Callyspongia (Cladochalina) aculeata (Linnaeus, 1759)

Van Soest, Rob W. M., 2025, Typification of Porifera described in the 10 edition of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae, volume II, 1759, Zootaxa 5638 (1), pp. 1-65 : 54

Callyspongia (Cladochalina) aculeata

Naturalis colleague Niels van der Windt sequenced the neotype specimen and obtained a COI sequence submitted to Genbank under accession nr. PP372828, using the present combination Callyspongia (Cladochalina) aculeata . The sequence was 100% similar to a sequence published by Pankey et al. (2022, as C. vaginalis ) from a Curaçao specimen (Genbank accession nr. MZ486759 ) and ditto by Erpenbeck et al. (2007, as C. vaginalis ) from a Caribbean specimen (Genbank accession nr. EF519579 , further locality not provided, voucher indicated as BH29).

There are many additional sequences of reliably identified specimens of this species under the name combination Callyspongia vaginalis . Some examples are: Lopes-Legentil et al. (2010) and Leal et al. (2017) published 28SrRNA sequences from Brazilian and Floridian specimens, GenBank accession nrs. respectively EU863806 and KY825185 . DeBiasse & Hellberg (2015) obtained sequences of Callyspongia longissima (here assumed to be a junior synonym of the present species) from Bocas del Torro, Caribbean Panama, GenBank accession nrs LK028525 (28SrRNA) and LK026896 (COI, also 100% similar to the neotype sequence). A general outcome of some of the studies on this species is that most genes do not sufficiently separate it from other Caribbean Callyspongia species (e.g. LopezLegentil et al. 2020 with Callyspongia (Callyspongia) fallax ).