On the Trail of the Baby Blue Sponge

    I sort of promised that I would get back to you if I was able to identify the blue sponge living near the surface on one of the military structures in Kawaihae harbor.  It took a couple days, but I now

A second example of the Bue Kawaihe sponge

have a couple responses that I thought I would share.  If you are a really smart invertebrate zoologist, this will not come as much of a surprise.  For me, it is a real eye opener.

   At this point you might want to refer back to the previous post for a look at the habitat and at the first picture of the blue sponge.  A second picture is included here.

   Pauline Fiene is a biologist and a dive guide on Maui.   Along with Cory Pittman she maintains a superb site that allows an amateur, like yours truly, to take a very good shot at visual identification of nudibranchs found in Hawaii.  She thought that our sponge might be Dysidea sp. and sent me link to a site in French Polynesia which won't open.

    Google searching Dysidea I found several images of this genus of sponges and many of them are blue.  There is a sponge in the Caribbean , Dysidea ethera, known as the heavenly sponge that is a lovely blue and looks like one of my two pictures.  I'm including one of the several pictures of this sponge posted by Snorkel St. John.  (If you happen to be going to St.John, it would be really nice if you could go snorkeling with this worthy company.)

Heavenly Sponge, Dysidea etherea  thanks to SnorkelStJ.com

   I have it on good authority that Mike Lindell is importing Heavenly sponge in bulk  from the
American Virgin Islands and including it in his patented fill, thus assuring that My Pillow provides the sweetest of dreams.  That he is busy exterminating this species in the wild is of no consequence to Mr. Lindell.  Being a staunch supporter of Donald Trump he does not believe that sponges are animals and the only conceivable reason God put them on this earth was to be used (as pillow stuffing) by man.

   Without knowing Pauline very well at all, I get the sense that, like me, she enjoys identifying animals by sight.  This method is the mainstay of birdwatching.  And I can assure you from first hand experience, it is a rare ornithologist that is not also a birdwatcher in the strict sense of the word.  This

means that while he might want to catch the little bird in his net and count and measure its feathers, he is perfectly happy to identify it by sight alone and repair to his life list where he checks it off over a tumbler of single malt.

Dr. De Maintenon.  Lookin' for sponge in all the wrong places

   Fishwatching is a lot like birdwatching.  Reef fish are large, colorful and there are not too many of them. If you can identify 200 species by sight, you are doing really well.  To be honest, I have not been around enough ichthyologists to know how many keep a life list, not to mention their preference for Highland dew.  I do know that they like to collect fish for examination.  And, of course, unlike a bird, which can be released after one measures its feathers, by the time you count the scales in the lateral line of a fish ( a common tool for identification) the fish is, to paraphrase John Cleese, an ex-fish, it is deceased, it is no more, on the way to the poki shack.

   But invertebrate watching is a totally different game.  All George W Bush jokes aside, there are brazillions of invertebrates.  (Ok.  I squeezed in one George Bush joke.  But the joke is on us...who ever thought we would remember W's tenure in the White House as the good old days?)  For example, the charming Ms. Fiene has photographs of a multitude of nudibranchs, probably hundreds, on her web site.  She may be able to identify most of them on the spot as she watches it crawl up a sponge encrusted column.  If so, at some level, this is not normal.  But in a good way.

   Never the less, she is still using visual identification of the whole, undisturbed animal.  Bird watching technique.

    As I told you in the previous blog, I sent a request for help to Marta De Maintenon, a professor of invertebrate zoology at UH Hilo.  Here is here response:

Hi Jeff,   Slugs are Tambja morosa and Goniobranchus vibratus (as you guessed). Sponges in Hawaii are not identifiable without spicule preps, and even with doing that half the time they can't be identified. This is in part because to the best of my knowledge there have
been few assessments of sponges from Hawaii, the last was a taxonomic paper published in 1951, and a key published in the 1970s that I find dubiously useful. BTW blue isn't unusual in sponges oddly enough.    M

Haliclona sp.  the Bright Violet Sponge

    If this is true, why does our good friend and mentor John Hoover have pictures of 32 species of sponges in his book?  I'm glad he does.  It gives me a place to start. Some of those sponges are pretty common and I feel like I can identify them in the field.  But Marta's comments should gives the  novice field biologist pause.  A spongeful of pause. 

   Surprisingly, when I read her note, I actually knew what she was talking about.  And I had known for at least two days.  When I researched the last blog, I ran across an article on the internet: Hawaiian Marine Sponges: Hilo Coastline by Jaaziel Garcia.  As it turns out, Sr. Garcia got his BS

The Bright violet Sponge as it appears in a margarita glass

from Hilo and Marta was his professor and this topic...our topic...was the subject of his senior thesis.  In his article he shows us at least fifteen species of sponge collected from near Hilo, both in their natural state and as a spicule prep.  I encourage you to read it and here is a link:

https://hawaiisponges.wordpress.com/

At the beginning of his article, Sr. Garcia gives us some real zoological philosophy.

    Marine sponges were once thought to be one of the simplest multicellular organisms of the metazoans. Instead, these organisms are actually highly complex and ecologically

Spicules from the Dirty Yellow Sponge

important to the reef ecosystem.

   That's heavy stuff for those of us that might blithely quote that study where you put a sponge in a Waring blender, pour it into a margarita glass and it re assembles itself.  Sr. Garcia would ask you to take that myth with a grain of salt.  And possibly some tequila and lemon.  Hold the spicules.

   In the event that the link doesn't work, I'm including a few pictures from his article so you get the idea of what a spicule prep looks like. I feel confident that with his name and topic you and Mr. Google can put your cursor on sponge blog (square pants?) in a trice. In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy the different sponges I see at Kawaihae, which is truly sponge heaven.  But any identifications I make are going to include one of those mental asterisks.

    Now, like a true ornithologist, I'm going to find a tumbler and work on my list.   

jeff