Agelasida
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Porifera
- Class: Demospongiae
- Order: Agelasida
Visual Description
Species placed in order Agelasida are typically conspicuous marine sponges with solid, robust external forms. Many examples show an erect or tubular growth form (e.g., Agelas spp.), sometimes with a sponge “tube” or finger-like projection that can appear yellowish to orange-brown in natural images. Museum specimens for Agelasida also frequently present as thick, firmly attached structures, consistent with a macroscopic, non-encrusting habit in numerous recorded taxa.
Ecology & Distribution
Agelasida is treated as an accepted sponge order in biodiversity databases, and GBIF records provide occurrence data for representatives of the order (including Agelasida itself and species-level identifications within families such as Agelasidae).[2]
Evolutionary Notes (Mitochondrial Introns)
Mitochondrial genomes in Agelasida can contain self-splicing introns in the cox1 (cytochrome oxidase subunit 1) gene. A study by Huchon and colleagues reported both mitochondrial group I and group II intron occurrences in sponge lineages including order Agelasida, and added new evidence by detecting additional cox1 intron-bearing species across multiple families. The work emphasizes that intron diversity in sponge mitochondrial genomes can be high and that acquisition of certain introns may involve horizontal gene transfer, inferred from relationships to introns known from other eukaryotic lineages (e.g., red algae) and differences in intron structure/phylogeny across taxa.[3]
Gallery
References
- ↑ Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Demospongiae / Agelasida constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- ↑ Agelasida. GBIF. https://www.gbif.org/species/1006. Accessed 2026-07-09.
- ↑ Dorothée Huchon; Amir Szitenberg; Sigal Shefer; Micha Ilan; Tamar Feldstein. Mitochondrial group I and group II introns in the sponge orders Agelasida and Axinellida. BMC Evolutionary Biology. 2015. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-015-0556-1.