CHECKLIST OF MARINE SPONGES OFF BIDONG ARCHIPELAGOS BASED ON COI GENE SEQUENCES

Abstract

Sponges are sessile marine animals under the phylum Porifera. Conventionally, the identification of sponges is based on two criteria: Morphology (shape, colour, surface characteristics and consistency) and macro-morphology (spicules, sponging fibres and their arrangement). This identification technique is sometimes unreliable due to the plasticity of sponges’ characteristics, which causes misidentification. We utilized universal barcode COI primers to identify sponges in this study. This study shows the results that have been collected through the study of the following methods. Out of 83 samples, only 25 sponges were successfully identified. They were from class Demospongia and were under subclass Heteroscleremorpha. The majority of the two main orders are Haplosclerida (28%) and order Tetractinellida (24%). The rest were from order Clionaida and Scopalinida (12%), Suberitida (8%), while order Axinellida, Tethyida, Poecilosclerida and Agelasida (4%). Among the identified samples, 16 were identified to species level while the rest were only identified up to genus level. A significant limitation of this study is that the sequences in the database are not well populated and have low diversity, making it challenging to conduct molecular identification. It also impacted the accuracy of the classification, making a single method of identification less reliable.