seahorsedreams
New member
Dose anyone know what kind of sponge this is?
Sponge ID
- Thread starter seahorsedreams
- Start date
greenbean36191
Premium Member
A reddish-orange demosponge. Except a few odd species there is no way to ID sponges from a picture. You can narrow it down to class (Demospongiae here), but any farther than that takes microscopic examination, habitat/locality information, and a lot of skill.
seahorsedreams
New member
Yes, I agree that it takes more than a pic to "properly" ID a sponge. But I think we can all agree that there are some common ones with unusual characteristics or similar characteristics that we are loosely able to apply a name to them. The Tree sponge (Acanthella sp), Orange paddle (Clathria sp) or the one above also from the Acanthella family, it seems.
greenbean36191
Premium Member
I agree that it's fine to attach common names to the sponges in the hobby based on their growth forms and colors, but I disagree that it's appropriate to ascribe any sort of taxonomic significance to those names. Growth form typically isn't diagnostic, nor is color. Tree and paddle sponges aren't an exception. Both growth forms are fairly common. Even if we could narrow the ID down to a genus such as Acanthella, that tells us essentially nothing about the sponge's care. Very little is known about the biology of the genus and it's cosmopolitan with members occurring in a variety of oceanic zones.
IMO when it comes to sponge IDs they're one of the groups best left to physical descriptions of color and growth form (Acropora is another such group). Those are usually more useful for inferring the care of the sponge than knowing a specific ID anyway. Without doing the requisite work any ID beyond class is really a wild guess. If you guess right then it doesn't help much anyway. If you guess wrong and base your care on a bad ID then you could end up doing more harm than good.
IMO when it comes to sponge IDs they're one of the groups best left to physical descriptions of color and growth form (Acropora is another such group). Those are usually more useful for inferring the care of the sponge than knowing a specific ID anyway. Without doing the requisite work any ID beyond class is really a wild guess. If you guess right then it doesn't help much anyway. If you guess wrong and base your care on a bad ID then you could end up doing more harm than good.
