Antarctotetilla leptoderma
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Porifera
- Class: Demospongiae
- Order: Tetractinellida
- Family: Tetillidae
- Genus: Antarctotetilla
- Species: Antarctotetilla leptoderma
Visual Description
Museum specimen imagery shows Antarctotetilla leptoderma as a small, globular to subspherical tetillid sponge with a compact external surface and a single conspicuous apical osculum positioned at the top of the body.
Species status and nomenclature
Antarctotetilla leptoderma is recorded as an accepted species name, originally described as Tetilla leptoderma by Sollas (1886).[2]
Taxonomic and morphological context within Antarctic Tetillidae
A phylogenetic reassessment of Antarctic Tetillidae reallocated Antarctic taxa formerly treated under Craniella into the genus Antarctotetilla, based on morphological re-examination and the identification of a cortical condition (“pseudocortex”) rather than the double-layered cortical structure characteristic of Craniella.[3]
Within Antarctotetilla, A. leptoderma is distinguished by having a single large apical osculum, in contrast to related congeners having multiple smaller oscula.[3]
The same reassessment reported that morphologically distinct Antarctic Antarctotetilla species—including A. leptoderma—were not genetically differentiated with the markers sampled, consistent with genetic crypticism under those mitochondrial/nuclear loci.[3]
Gallery
References
- ↑ Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Demospongiae / Tetractinellida / Tetillidae / Antarctotetilla / leptoderma constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- ↑ Antarctotetilla leptoderma (Sollas, 1886). GBIF. https://www.gbif.org/species/9167198. Accessed 2026-07-09.
- 1 2 3 Carella Mirco; Gemma Agell; Paco Cárdenas; María Jesús Uriz. Phylogenetic Reassessment of Antarctic Tetillidae (Demospongiae, Tetractinellida) Reveals New Genera and Genetic Similarity among Morphologically Distinct Species. PLoS ONE. 2016. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0160718.