"Wide" vs. "long"

Marine scientists this week reported finding an immense sea sponge in a marine preserve near Hawaii.  They described it this way:

“It’s probably on the order of centuries to millennia old,” lead researcher Daniel Wagner told the Guardian. The sponge, the largest on record, is “about 12ft wide and 7ft long” he said, “so about the size of a minivan”.

I'll defer to the copyeditors who read this blog, but my assumption would be that the greater dimension would be referred to as the length and the shorter one as the width.  Unless a sponge has a front and a back...