Asteropus kaena
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Porifera
- Class: Demospongiae
- Order: Tetractinellida
- Family: Ancorinidae
- Genus: Asteropus
- Species: Asteropus kaena
Visual Description
The Naturalis Biodiversity Center specimen image depicts Asteropus kaena as a compact, cushion-like sponge body (preserved specimen). The visible surface texture appears smooth to only lightly hispid, consistent with an undivided mass rather than an obvious branching form.
Taxonomy notes
A revision of Atlantic Asteropus by Hajdu & van Soest (1992) treats diagnostic species-group concepts within Asteropus based on spicule (microsclere) characters and provides a diagnostic framework for distinguishing Atlantic taxa using spicule features (e.g., oxyasters and presence/absence of trichodragmata, and patterns of oxeas categories). In that framework, Asteropus is diagnosed as an Ancorinidae taxon lacking triaenes and bearing a tangential ectosomal skeleton of megascleres with oxyasters and sanidasters (and trichodragmata may be present in some species).
Distribution and status
GBIF lists Asteropus kaena as an accepted species (de Laubenfels, 1957). The GBIF record points to Naturalis Biodiversity Center material (basis of record: preserved specimen).
Nomenclature
GBIF indicates the basionym Stellettinopsis kaena de Laubenfels, 1957.
Gallery
References
- ↑ Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Demospongiae / Tetractinellida / Ancorinidae / Asteropus / kaena constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.