Sponge-dwelling fauna: a review of known species from the Northwest Tropical Atlantic coral reefs

Abstract

Within tropical shallow-water coral reefs, marine sponges provide microhabitats for a wide range of fauna. Although there have been numerous studies and reports of symbiotic relationships among sponges and their associated fauna, those pieces of information are isolated and disconnected. For this reason, based on the available literature, we compiled a species-interaction dataset of coral reefs marine sponge guest known to date. We introduce a dataset that includes 69 articles that report 92 species of sponge hosts clustered in 12 Orders having a guest/host interaction with 300 guest species from 6 Phyla present in the Northwestern Tropical Atlantic coral reefs. This dataset consists of two types of information: 1. A machine-readable data and 2. A human-readable data. These two types of coding improve the scope of the dataset and facilitates the link between machine platforms and human friendly displays. We also created an interactive visualization of the interactions data-matrix and of a dynamic Chord Diagram of the host-guest species connections to generate a user-friendly link between the humans and the dataset.