Meeting Abstract

S8-1.3  Sunday, Jan. 6  The integrative phylogeny approach applied to Porifera: a case-study the Homoscleromorpha BOURY-ESNAULT, N.*; LAVROV, D.; PéREZ, T.; IMBE-UMR7263, CNRS, Université d’Aix-Marseille, Station Marine d’Endoume, Marseille, France; Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA; IMBE-UMR7263 CNRS, Université d’Aix-Marseille, Station Marine d’Endoume, Marseille, France nicole.boury-esnault@orange.fr

The two main scientific tasks of taxonomy are species’delineating and classification. These two tasks are often treated differently, with species classification accomplished by newly-developed phylogenetic methods, often based on molecular sequences, while species delimitation is conducted by what is often considered as an “old-fashioned” typological approach based on a morphological description. A new “integrative taxonomy” approach has been recently proposed (Dayrat, 2005) maintaining that species delimitation should be a multidisciplinary undertaking combining several independent datasets. Here we argue that the same principle is relevant to species classification. In the last 20 years we assembled various datasets based on external morphology, anatomy, cytology, spicule shapes, geography, reproduction, genetic sequences and metabolomics of homoscleromorph sponges. We show how we used these datasets to describe new species of homoscleromorph sponges and to elucidate their phylogenetic relationships and their phylogenetic position within the phylum Porifera.