 to better fiber optic materials and networks," says Joanna Aizenberg, the Bell Labs materials scientist who led the research team. "Mother Nature's ability to perfect materials is amazing, and the more we study biological organisms, the more we realize how much we can learn from them." The sponge in the study, Euplectella, lives in the depths of the ocean in the tropics and grows to about half a foot in length. Commonly known as the THE FUTURE IS FIBER-OPTICAL TECHNOLOGIES Venus Flower Basket, it has an intricate cylindrical mesh-like skeleton of glassy silica, often inhabited by a pair of mating shrimp. At the base of the sponge's skeleton is a tuft of fibers that extends outward like an inverted crown. Typically, these fibers are between two and seven inches long and about the thickness of a human hair. The Bell Labs team found that each of the sponge's fibers comprises dis- tinct layers with different optical properties. Concentric silica cylinders with high organic content surround an inner core of high-purity silica glass, a struc- ture similar to industrial optical fiber, in which layers of glass cladding sur- round a glass core of slightly different composition. The researchers found during experiments that the biological fibers of the sponge conducted light beautifully when illuminated and found them to use the same optical princi- ples that modern engineers have used to design industrial optical fiber. "These biological fibers bear a striking resemblance to commercial telecommunica- tions fibers, as they use the same material and have similar dimensions," says Aizenberg. Although these natural bio-optical fibers do not have the superbly high transparency needed for modern telecommunication networks, the Bell Labs researchers found that these fibers do have a big advantage in that they are extremely resilient to cracks and breakage. Commercial optical fiber is extremely reliable; however, outages can occur mainly due to crack growth within the fiber. Infrequent as an outage is, when it occurs, replacing 