Alectona
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Porifera
- Class: Demospongiae
- Order: Tetractinellida
- Family: Thoosidae
- Genus: Alectona
Visual Description
GBIF/Naturalis-linked museum specimen images for Alectona show preserved demosponges as rigid, sponge bodies suitable for morphological study (including spicule-based identification).
Taxonomic Identity and Naming
- Alectona* is accepted as a genus (authorship Carter, 1879) within family Thoosidae in Demospongiae.
Phylogenetic Context (Astrophorida; spicule homoplasy)
Molecular phylogenetic work targeting the order Astrophorida (within Demospongiae) indicates that higher-level relationships inferred from spicule characters can be affected by homoplasy (convergent evolution and/or secondary loss). This general result cautions that morphological spicule similarity around astrophorid/demospongiid lineages may not reliably diagnose deeper taxonomic boundaries, including family-level groupings in which Alectona is placed.
Gallery
References
- ↑ Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Demospongiae / Tetractinellida / Thoosidae / Alectona constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.