Aplysina aerophoba
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Porifera
- Class: Demospongiae
- Order: Verongiida
- Family: Aplysinidae
- Genus: Aplysina
- Species: Aplysina aerophoba
Species identity
Aplysina aerophoba is a sponge species accepted in GBIF under the name Aplysina aerophoba (Nardo, 1833).[2]
Visual Description
Online image inspection was attempted using dataset image references, but the remote sources returned access errors (e.g., HTTP 403) during download. As a result, this section is left without image-derived morphological detail.
Ecology and physiology (oxygen dynamics)
Laboratory work on Mediterranean Aplysina aerophoba shows that the sponge’s oxygen microenvironment is strongly controlled by pumping behavior. In specimens that enter a non-pumping state, tissue becomes anoxic within ~15 minutes, with oxygen remaining only in a thin surface layer (about 1 mm) supplied mainly by molecular diffusion over the sponge surface.[3]
Quantitatively, total oxygen consumption rates in non-pumping sponges were about 6–12 μmol cm⁻³ sponge day⁻¹, while oxygenation of the entire tissue was maintained in pumping sponges, which showed higher oxygen consumption (~22–37 μmol cm⁻³ sponge day⁻¹).[3]
A generalizable conclusion is that sponge–microbe metabolism at the holobiont scale can shift between aerobic and anaerobic states as flow conditions change, implying that short-term flow stoppages can create repeated oxygen minima (“pulses of anoxia”).[3]
Gallery
References
- ↑ Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Demospongiae / Verongiida / Aplysinidae / Aplysina / aerophoba constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- ↑ Aplysina aerophoba (Nardo, 1833). GBIF. https://www.gbif.org/species/2239334. Accessed 2026-07-09.
- 1 2 3 Friederike Hoffmann; Hans Røy; Kristina Bayer; Ute Hentschel; Martin Pfannkuchen; Franz Brümmer; Dirk de Beer. Oxygen dynamics and transport in the Mediterranean sponge Aplysina aerophoba. Marine Biology. 2008. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00227-008-0905-3.