[Saltwaterhobby]

Hi guys, do you guys know what this coral is called?? I just bought it today and the guy at the lps told me that it is call redball sponge but the red ball looks different from this one. Could you guys help me out here, any information such as light, type of foods he eats, etc, about this coral will be greatly appreciated. Here is the picture.

http://i60.photobucket.com/albums/h2...4/DSCN2709.jpg

[greenbean36191]

It's not a coral. It's a sponge like the guy said. What type of lighting and flow it will tolerate are anyone's guess. There is really no way of knowing without IDing it to species (which would take several experts) and/ or knowing exactly what kind of environment it came from. It probably feeds on bacteria or small phytoplankton, but again, it varies from species to species.

[Jasno999]

It is cool looking

[Saltwaterhobby]

So, I guess no one really knows what this coral is called???? Me either, but it seems to be doing just fine.

Don't be stupid, all sponges are indenfied as difficult to take care of, so as a mandarin, but I have both of them in a tank you wouldn't believe.

[Ninong]

Originally Posted by Saltwaterhobby

So, I guess no one really knows what this coral is called????

What coral?

[Poseidon]

You must have missed this post from above:

Originally Posted by greenbean36191

It's not a coral. It's a sponge like the guy said. What type of lighting and flow it will tolerate are anyone's guess. There is really no way of knowing without IDing it to species (which would take several experts) and/ or knowing exactly what kind of environment it came from. It probably feeds on bacteria or small phytoplankton, but again, it varies from species to species.

[Saltwaterhobby]

I'm looking for a specific name and hoping one of you guys could help me out because I don't know any experts. Sorry about the above post Ninong, it a sponge not a coral.

[Poseidon]

Sorry Saltwaterhobby, with a sponge there really is no way to indentify it unless we know where it came from EXACTLY. Even if that is known, then an ID may still be impossible unless you disect the specimen, or at least take a sample of it.

There are literally THOUSANDS of unidentified species in the ocean, so don't feel bad. I'll bet your spnge was collected because of its color. The collector knew that some poor schmo would buy it, so it didn't matter to him that its dietary requirements remain unknown.

Witness the collection of "Carnation Corals" or "Gonipora" or lately the Elegance coral, all of these species I see regularly in the LFS, however very few hobbiests can keep these alive much longer then 6 months. Is it ethical to collect a species doomed to die? Of course not, but that collector has to feed his family, and as long as we keep buying them, he will keep collecting them!

[Ninong]

Identification based on a single photograph is nothing more than a guessing game. This is true for poriferans (sponges) just as it is for cnidarians (corals, anemones, jelly fish, etc.).

Sponges are in their own phylum, Porifera, with more than 5,000 species.

[sihaya]

Originally Posted by Ninong

Identification based on a single photograph is nothing more than a guessing game.

Tru dat

But you know, if anyone could label something as coral or sponge based on a single bad photo, it would be Mike. That kid is a machine.

[Ninong]

Originally Posted by sihaya

Tru dat

But you know, if anyone could label something as coral or sponge based on a single bad photo, it would be Mike. That kid is a machine.

I was talking about identification down to species or sometimes even genus, not identification as to which phylum an animal belongs in. For instance, with corals it is fairly easy for most people to identify a member of the Acropora genus but almost impossible to determine which of the nearly 300 different species a particular specimen may belong to based on a photograph.

The differences between a cnidarian and a poriferan are pretty obvious unless the photograph is really blurry and there would be no question whatsoever for a person viewing the animal in person. One has polyps and the other doesn't.

[greenbean36191]

Yep, sponges are just too plastic morphologically to be identified by pictures alone. Depending on where a single species grows it could take on just about any shape and texture. Generally to get an ID you need a picture of the whole animal in the field, and a tissue sample to dissolve and look at the spicules. You also need a good reference to compare the results to. Unfortunately there isn't one just yet, since the taxonomy of sponges is a mess right now.

As an example of how difficult sponges are to identify, one of my professors was curious what species of sponge was boring into a coral sample he had. He knew the exact locality it was from, had pictures of it in the field, and had a whole sample of it. When he sent samples of a single sponge to three experts on sponges, they all sent back different identifications.

[sihaya]

This might be a dumb question... but is it even clear that there actually are definable species with all these things? Could it be that they just don't break down into species the way other animals do?

[Saltwaterhobby]

Hey guys thank you for all the info. If I know that this sponge is doom from the start I wouldn't even buy it. I can't say that, I don't even know for sure if it is going to die. It seems like it has some ployps all around itself and seems to like very low light. Its current status, maybe happy. Again thanks for the info, all I could do is hope for it to survive.

[greenbean36191]

This might be a dumb question... but is it even clear that there actually are definable species with all these things? Could it be that they just don't break down into species the way other animals do?

It's an excellent question. The truth is that classical taxonomy just doesn't work that well with lots of simpler animals. For more "advanced" animals like mammals that form discreet populations and reproduce sexually, the most popular definition of species, the biological species concept, works pretty well. The BSC defines a species as all of the actually or potentially interbreeding natural groups of populations that are reproductively isolated from other groups. This definition relies on sexual reproduction to define what a species is, and in some of the simpler animal phyla like rotifers, some members don't have sexual reproduction. Then how do you define a species? If you can't even define a species then how can you tell whether an individual is or isn't part of that species?

Another problem is that in a lot of these animals, including corals and sponges, there is almost continuous morphological variation between species. If you have an individual halfway between two species, the system still forces you to put it into one or the other even though that's not how things really are in nature. It's kind of like a number system where integers exsist, but decimals don't. You have to either say that 1.5 is 1 or 2.

With sponges in particular, txonomy is hard because morphologically, they're so plastic. They can take on pretty much any shape. Really the only relatively constant character they have is the size, shape, and number of spicules. You generally want to base a species description on more than one characteristic though, so color, texture, and to some degree growth form have been used.

Almost all sponge descriptions are based on morphological characteristics alone, rather than combining that information with molecular evidence. That can cause lots of trouble though because in lots of other phyla we are finding out that what we once thought was a single species is turning out to be a whole suite of species based on molecular evidence.

The reverse can also be true. What we think are two species have often turned out to be the same. This was the case with a sponge from the Pacific (though the discovery wasn't due to molecular evidence). There was a pretty red sponge with star shaped canals on its surface found in shallow water. In deep water there was a smooth red sponge. It seemed obvious that they were different species based on their surface texture, and they were classified that way for many years. Eventually though, someone realized that the shallow water sponge was being preyed upon by a nudibranch that ate off the surface layer and exposed the canals underneath. When the nudibranch, which is only found in shallow water, was removed, the shallow water and deep water forms turned out to be identical. In fact they were the same species.

[Poseidon]

^^^

Great info, and example!

[Jasno999]

awsome

[sihaya]

Mike, you're the best. Thank you!

[zhenya]

Originally Posted by greenbean36191

The reverse can also be true. What we think are two species have often turned out to be the same.

This is an exellent point, Mike. It holds true for some of the cnidarians as well, like the stony corals from Acropora genus. I was reading some of Veron's work on reticulated evolution and it is pretty clear that the entire taxonomy of the corals could be reworked if you travel from one area to another, even on the same GBR.