Dr. Jan Vicente, of Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology (HIMB) and lead author of the Zootaxia article in which four new ...

Limnology and Oceanography, Vol. 56, No. 5 (2011), pp. 1577-1586 (10 pages) To investigate the importance of symbiont-derived nutrition to host sponges, we coupled manipulative shading experiments ...

Coral reefs typically occur in oligotrophic waters, where tight recycling of energy and nutrients is essential in order to support their high productivity. Sponges are efficient filter feeders that ...

Despite their distinction as one of Earth’s oldest lifeforms and the key role they play in sustaining coral reef ecosystems, marine sponges are vastly understudied. Kāne’ohe Bay, where HIMB ...

Sessile organisms, such as sponges, produce chemical compounds that deter predation (Pawlik et al. 1995). Space is an extremely limiting resource on coral reefs. On steep slopes, plate-shaped ...

Sponge reefs were common on Earth millions of years ago but were only known from fossil records. For paleontologists, the find was akin to running across a herd of apatosauruses in an unexplored ...

They say that, despite their distinction as one of Earth’s oldest lifeforms and the "key" role they play in sustaining coral reef ecosystems, marine sponges are vastly understudied. KÄ ne ...