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

Humberto Fortunato (1) , Thierry Perez (2) , Gisele Lobo-Hajdu (1)

1 UFRJ - Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
2 IMBE - Institut méditerranéen de biodiversité et d'écologie marine et continentale

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 Northeastern coast of Brazil seems to harbour a richest sponge fauna, our current knowledge is concentrated along the Southeastern Atlantic coast. A survey has been 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:

Keywords: Marine sponges; intertidal; biodiversity; Halichondriidae; Suberitidae; Tropical Western Atlantic

Domains: Environmental Sciences; Biodiversity and Ecology

Humberto Fortunato, Thierry Perez, Gisele Lobo-Hajdu. Morphological description of six species of Suberitida (Porifera: Demospongiae) from the unexplored north-eastern coast of Brazil, with emphasis on two new species. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the UK, 2020, 100 (3), pp.389-400. ⟨10.1017/S0025315420000296⟩. ⟨hal-02548881⟩