Auletta lyrata
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Porifera
- Class: Demospongiae
- Order: Bubarida
- Family: Bubaridae
- Genus: Auletta
- Species: Auletta lyrata
Visual Description
Based on the limited TreeOfLife-200M image sample for Auletta lyrata (GBIF/Naturalis preserved-specimen records), the specimens show upright, tube-like/pipe-like growth units rather than an encrusting sheet-like form. The preserved material is photographed as consolidated tubular structures consistent with the “organ-pipe” growth form attributed to Auletta in broad morphological descriptions for pipe/tube-forming demosponges. (No fine-scale internal skeletal characters can be determined from these specimen images.)[1]
Taxonomic notes
GBIF currently treats Auletta lyrata (Esper, 1794) as an accepted species within the genus Auletta and family Bubaridae, with the basionym Spongia lyrata Esper, 1794.[2]
Although Auletta is morphologically compared in revisions of “tube-forming” axinellid sponges, Alvarez et al. (2008) emphasizes that boundaries among closely related pipe/tube-forming genera can be difficult to diagnose using growth form alone. Their discussion of Pipestela specifically notes that, while Pipestela shares a tube-like growth morphology with Auletta, the genera are separated using choanosomal skeletal architecture and spicule-tract characters.[3]
Gallery
References
- 1 2 Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Demospongiae / Bubarida / Bubaridae / Auletta / lyrata constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- ↑ Auletta lyrata (Esper, 1794). GBIF. https://www.gbif.org/species/5183078. Accessed 2026-07-09.
- ↑ Belinda Alvarez; John N. A. Hooper; Rob W. M. van Soest. Pipestela, a new genus of Axinellidae (Porifera: Demospongiae: Halichondrida) and description of three new species. UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam). 2008. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16233179.