Latrunculia

Samaai, Toufiek, Gibbons, Mark J., Kelly, Michelle & Davies-Coleman, Mike, 2003, South African Latrunculiidae (Porifera: Demospongiae: Poecilosclerida): descriptions of new species of Latrunculia du Bocage, Strongylodesma Lévi, and Tsitsikamma Samaai & Kelly, Zootaxa 371, pp. 1-26 : 6

Genus Latrunculia du Bocage 1869

Type species. Latrunculia cratera du Bocage, 1869:161

Representative species. Latrunculia bocagei Ridley & Dendy, 1887: 238 (after Samaai & Kelly, 2002)

Diagnosis. Encrusting or semispherical with trumpet­shaped or cylindrical oscules and mammiform or crater­like areolate porefields, surface velvety to the touch, texture in life soft, cakey, dense, slightly compressible in preservative. Colour in life deep brownish black, dark green, sometimes tinged with deep blue, in preservative specimens always retain their dark pigmentation. Choanosomal architecture consists of megascleres arranged in an irregular, large­meshed reticulation formed by wispy tracts of spicules, which lack spongin reinforcement. The ectosomal skeleton is a tangential layer of megascleres, being somewhat plumose at the base of the ectosome. Megascleres are styles, often centrally thickened and occasionally wavy, narrowing of the proximal (rounded) end variable, sometimes anisoxeate or terminally spined, occasionally polytylote. Microscleres are typically anisodiscorhabds, occasionally aciculodiscorhabds and rarely, large spined metasterlike oxydiscorhabds and acanthomicroxeas. Microscleres are disposed in a palisade with their basal whorls buried in the outer ectosome (modified from Samaai & Kelly, 2002).