PANSINI M.

Until now, only 177 species of sponges (Porifera) have been reported for Chilean coastal waters. Here we describe recent scuba diving surveys undertaken to improve our knowledge of the diversity of the sponge fauna of the Seno Magdalena, Puyuhuapi Fjord and Jacaf Canal in Chilean Patagonia. Despite these relatively harsh environments, our study...

TheHaLongBay(Vietnam)isashallowarealocatedinthenorthernpart of the Tonkin Gulf, in the South China Sea. It includes more than 3000 islands of variable sizes. A continuous action of karstic processes, initiating around 280 million of years ago, shaped the formation of extraordinary caves and shallow salt-water lakes. These impressive structures...

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The use of ROVs has greatly enhanced the possibility of obtaining information on living deep sponge communities (Bertolino et al. 2015). The aim of this work is to describe a new Mediterranean species, Antho (Plocamia) sarasiri sp. nov. (Microcionidae Carter, 1875), characterized by dumbbell spicules making up the framework of the choanosomal...

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Here we describe two new species of deep-sea sponges collected during the exploration of Cold-Water Coral (CWC) banks discovered in the Nora and Coda Cavallo canyons (north-eastern and south coast of Sardinia respectively). Poecillastra tavianii n. sp. differs from the other congeneric species mainly for the dicho- and mesodichotriaenes, never...

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This study deals with the sponge fauna of Puyuhuapi Fjord and Jacaf Canal (Chile), southern Pacific Ocean. The main preliminary result is the identification of 23 sponge species: 9 of them are probably new to science and 3 are new records for the Pacific Ocean. This further addition to the number of sponges known from the Chilean Fjord Region...

In the Mediterranean Sea, the two sponges of the genus Aplysina (A. aerophoba and A. cavernicola) are identified on the basis of their external morphology and the environment in which they live. During a research program on the sponge fauna in semi-submerged caves of the Italian coasts, we have sampled an abundant very small yellow sponge,...

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Climate change and heavy anthropic pressures are giving rise to important modifications in the rocky benthic communities of the Mediterranean Sea. In particular, sponge assemblages have been deeply affected due to the susceptibility of some species to dramatic phenomena such as mass mortalities or widespread variations in the abundance of other...