Aciculites
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Porifera
- Class: Demospongiae
- Order: Tetractinellida
- Family: Scleritodermidae
- Genus: Aciculites
Visual Description
Specimens attributed to Aciculites (Scleritodermidae, Tetractinellida) are represented in museum collections by preserved sponge material. In dataset images, these specimens present as solid, compact demosponge morphotypes (museum specimen format), consistent with Tetractinellida scleritodermid sponges being commonly stored/photographed as intact preserved fragments or whole specimen pieces rather than as grossly soft, delicate forms.
Nomenclature and Taxonomic Status
Aciculites is treated as an accepted genus (GBIF taxonomic status: accepted) with the citation “Schmidt, 1879.”[2]
Molecular Marker Notes (Mitochondrial introns)
Mitochondrial group I introns have been documented in Scleritodermidae sponges, including Aciculites (detected in multiple Aciculites genera in the study), within the broader context of group I intron evolution in mitochondrial cox1 across tetractinellid sponges.[3] The same work discusses implications for DNA barcoding when introns occur within/near commonly targeted mitochondrial regions.[3]
Genetic Information Availability
NCBI resources associate Aciculites with the Porifera → Demospongiae → Tetractinellida lineage and provide a taxonomic entry for the genus used for nucleotide record searching.[4]
Gallery
References
- ↑ Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Demospongiae / Tetractinellida / Scleritodermidae / Aciculites constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- ↑ Aciculites Schmidt, 1879. GBIF. https://www.gbif.org/species/2252139. Accessed 2026-07-09.
- 1 2 Astrid Schuster; Jose V. Lopez; Leontine E. Becking; Michelle Kelly; Shirley A. Pomponi; Gert Wörheide; Dirk Erpenbeck; Paco Cárdenas. Evolution of group I introns in Porifera: new evidence for intron mobility and implications for DNA barcoding. BMC Evolutionary Biology. 2017. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-017-0928-9.
- ↑ Aciculites. NCBI Nucleotide. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/?term=txid283584[organism:exp]. Accessed 2026-07-10.