Ascaltis
Taxonomy
This page represents the following TreeOfLife-200M taxonomic path.[1]
- Kingdom: Animalia
- Phylum: Porifera
- Class: Calcarea
- Order: Clathrinida
- Family: Leucascidae
- Genus: Ascaltis
Visual Description
Specimens in available records for Ascaltis (notably Ascaltis reticulum) show calcareous sponge body plans consistent with Calcarea: anastomosed tubular structure forming a compact cormus, with the overall aspect of a thin, irregularly reticulate sponge body in both museum specimens and field images. Many images appear as preserved specimens (museum material) or photographic observations where the sponge network is visible as a lace-like/tubular mesh on a substrate.
Ecology & Taxonomic Notes (from Adriatic Ascaltis material)
- A detailed taxonomic account of Ascaltis reticulum for the Adriatic fauna uses combined morphological and DNA-taxa approaches for identification within Calcarea, and it explicitly addresses placement of reticulum in Ascaltis as circumscribed for that fauna. [2]
- For A. reticulum, the morphology described includes a cormus of regular, tightly anastomosed tubes and water-collecting tubes (often difficult to assess if fragmented in preserved material). [2]
- The skeleton/spicule description reported for A. reticulum includes triactines, tetractines, and diactines; a notable diagnostic remark is the observation of spines on the apical actine of tetractines (also reported to be confirmed on the neotype). [2]
- In that study, specimens of A. reticulum were collected from vertical shaded hard limestone bottoms. [2]
- Ascaltis is treated as an accepted genus by GBIF, cited as Ascaltis Haeckel, 1872. [3]
Gallery
References
- ↑ Dataset view for Animalia / Porifera / Calcarea / Clathrinida / Leucascidae / Ascaltis constructed from imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M records under this taxonomic path. Hugging Face Datasets. https://huggingface.co/datasets/imageomics/TreeOfLife-200M.
- 1 2 3 4 Michelle Klautau; Mirna Imešek; Fernanda Correia Azevedo; Bruna Pleše; Vedran Nikolić; Helena Ćetković. Adriatic calcarean sponges (Porifera, Calcarea), with the description of six new species and a richness analysis. European Journal of Taxonomy. 2016. https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2016.178.
- ↑ Ascaltis Haeckel, 1872. GBIF. https://www.gbif.org/species/2236743. Accessed 2026-07-09.