Morphological description of six species of Suberitida (Porifera: Demospongiae) from the unexplored north-eastern coast of Brazil, with emphasis on two new species

Abstract

The Order Suberitida is defined as a group of marine sponges without an obvious cortex, a skeleton devoid of microscleres, and with a deletion of a small loop of 15 base pairs in the secondary structure of the 28S rDNA as a molecular synapomorphy. Suberitida comprises three families and 26 genera distributed worldwide, but mostly in temperate and polar waters. Twenty species were reported along the entire Brazilian coast, and although the north-eastern coast of Brazil seems to harbour a rich sponge fauna, our current knowledge is concentrated along the south-eastern Atlantic coast. A survey was implemented along the northern coast of Brazil, and the collection allowed the identification of six species belonging to the Order Suberitida. Two of them are considered new to science: Suberites purpura sp. nov., Hymeniacidon upaonassu sp. nov., and four, Halichondria (Halichondria) marianae Santos, Nascimento & Pinheiro, 2018, Halichondria (H.) melanadocia de Laubenfels, 1936, Suberites aurantiacus (Duchassaing & Michelotti, 1864), and Terpios fugax Duchassaing & Michelotti, 1864, are re-described. Taxonomic comparisons are made for Tropical Western Atlantic species and type species of the four genera. Finally, an identification key for the Western Atlantic Suberites species is provided.

Taxonomy and phylogeny of the family Suberitidae (Porifera: Demospongiae) in California

“…By combining DNA and morphological analyses on the same samples, we show that species within the family can be identified morphologically within a regional fauna. This finding is consistent with recent revisions in other regions that used morphological characters alone and were able to discover and describe new species in the family (Cóndor-Luján et al 2023;Fortunato et al 2020;Morozov et al 2018). However, our molecular phylogeny indicates that most of the genera within the family are polyphyletic.…”

“…This finding is consistent with recent revisions in other regions that used morphological characters alone and were able to discover and describe new species in the family (Cóndor-Luján et al . 2023; Fortunato et al . 2020; Morozov et al .…”

The Porifera, Cnidaria, Bryozoa, and Echinodermata Collections of the Universidade Federal Do Ceará: Contributions to the Marine Biodiversity Knowledge of Northeastern Brazil

“…Later, in the early 1970s, Johnson (1971) published the first inventory of marine sponges for the Ceará coast. In recent years, studies with Porifera are being carried out in Ceará, including the description of new species Lotufo & Hajdu, 2006), extraction of compounds (e.g., Carneiro et al, 2013;Santos et al, 2015;Carneiro et al, 2017), synthesis of knowledge (Soares et al, 2016b), and new sponges records (Azevedo et al, 2017;Klautau et al, 2020;Fortunato;Perez & Lobo-Hajdu, 2020).…”