Aplysina archeri
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 archeri
Visual Description
Available dataset images for Aplysina archeri depict a marine sponge with a distinctly elongate, pipe-like (finger-like) form. Specimens are typically shown as upright tubular projections rising from a substrate. Coloration reported in specimen/field images can range from pink to pinkish-red (including “pink variation” specimen images).
Species identity, synonymy, and vernacular name
GBIF lists Aplysina archeri (Higgin, 1875) as an accepted species, with the basionym given as Luffaria archeri Higgin, 1875. A commonly used English vernacular name is “Stove-pipe Sponge.”
Phylogeny and integrative taxonomy (genus-level context)
Integrative taxonomic work on the genus Aplysina in the Eastern Pacific (Demospongiae: Verongida) illustrates how species delimitation in these sponges benefits from combining (i) morphology, (ii) chemical/skeletal evidence—specifically chitin as a principal structural component of the skeleton in Aplysina—and (iii) molecular markers such as mitochondrial COI and nuclear ITS1–5.8S–ITS2. The study further notes that COI may show very low variability within Aplysina, so ITS markers can provide stronger support for species-level distinctions.
Gallery
References
- ↑ Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Demospongiae / Verongiida / Aplysinidae / Aplysina / archeri constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.