Can you identify these marine sponges available in Bay of Bengal region of India?
Dear Dr. Baskar,
Thanks for your inputs and these first two are the sponges collected from Bay of Bengal near Pulicat lake area, Hope you will through some lights on this area
Regards
Dr.Sethi
The last one seems to be Haliclona.
Are there any molluscan fragments in the first 2 pics.
The best is to look at the sponge spicules (= siliceous skeleton).
Digest a small piece of the sponge (0.5 cm) with bleach in an eppendorf tube. When everything is digested, remove the bleach and then wash with water, and one last wash with ethanol 96%. Put a drop of the spicule preparation on a glass slide and put a cover slide on top. Look under an optical microscope. The morphology of the spicules will already tell you what kind of sponge they are (Demospongiae or Homoscleromorpha) and will probably also give you a sponge order and family.
Good luck!
Dear Dr.Paco,
Thanks for your sponge identification methodology, Can I see the spicules under normal binocular microscopes, bleaching means digest with sodium hypochlorite liquid then alcohol 95% then supernanat see under microscope. If you have any standard methodology ,kindly send us
Regards
Dr.Sethi
Yes, bleach is just regular chlorine for cleaning. A small sponge piece (0.5 cm) should be digested in 2 hours, but the spicules will remain intact. Then you suck up the bleach (with a pasteur pipette for instance) and put water. Mix, wait 15 minutes or so. Then remove the water and replace with ehanol 96%. The different washes is just to get clean spicules. Then suck some of the spicule solution (with a pasteur pipette), and put a few drops on a slide, put a cover-slide on top. You can see the spicules with a regular microscope (you can even see them with the naked eye for some big ones).
If you want to make a permanent spicule slide. You can also wait for the ethanol to evaporate on the slide. With a different pasteur pipette, drop some embedding medium on the slide (e.g. Canada balsam). Put a cover slide. Let the embedding medium harden before looking under the microscope.
Dear Dr. Senti,
Hope you identified the species of the above sponges .could you please share me the species name of the sponge third in you image series.
We are working on isolation of bioactive compounds from marine and fresh water sponges. We want to explore Indian coasts, being one of the richest in biodiversity in terms of sponges. We need around 10-20 g of each specimen. Can Anyone give me some idea how to get them. Is there any conservation related issues regarding these. I saw papers where they did collect marine sponges from India.
Thanks in Advance
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