Table 1.
Summary of all the sponge records held in the database created for this study.
Figure 1.
Map of the Southern Ocean and neighbouring regions.
The dotted line around Antarctica represents the mean position of the PF. 1 = Tierra del Fuego, 2 = Falkland Islands, 3 = South Georgia, 4 = South Sandwich Islands, 5 = South Orkney Islands, 6 = South Shetland Islands, 7 = Antarctic Peninsula, 8 = Bouvet Island, 9 = Prince Edward Islands, 10 = Crozet Islands, 11 = Kerguelen Islands, 12 = McMurdo Sound, 13 = Macquarie Island, 14 = Tasmania, 15 = Chatham Islands.
Figure 2.
Quantifying the distribution of sponges within the Southern Ocean and neighbouring regions.
Maps include three classes of Porifera (Demospongiae (ai–iii), Calcarea (bi–iii), and Hexactinellida (ci–iii)). (i) The distribution of sample locations for each class of sponge. (ii) The number of unique sample stations in a 3° by 3° grid cell for each class of sponge. (iii) The number of species collected from each 3° by 3° grid cell for each class of sponge.
Figure 3.
Rarefaction curves which show the accumulation of sponge species (all 3 classes of sponge were used) for selected 3° by 3° grid cells from the Southern Ocean and neighbouring regions.
Rarefaction curves are coloured by region: Dark blue (solid) = Antarctic Peninsula; Blue (dashed) = East Weddell Sea; Blue (dotted) = East Antarctic; Turquoise (solid) = Ross Sea; Black (solid) = South Shetland Islands; Black (dotted) = South Georgia, Yellow (solid) = Kerguelen Islands; Red (solid) = South America and the Falkland Islands; Green (solid) = New Zealand (North Island); and Purple (solid) = South Africa.
Figure 4.
Latitudinal and longitudinal range sizes of sponge species found at three or more locations in the Southern Ocean and neighbouring regions.
(a) Longitudinal range and (b) is the latitudinal range. Range size is the difference between the maximum and minimum range points and does not imply that the organism is found everywhere in-between.
Figure 5.
General distribution patterns of sponge species found at three or more locations within the Southern Ocean and neighbouring regions.
The numbers of species per patterns are: a = 52, b = 53, c = 51, d = 47, e = 26, f = 11, g = 10, h = 6, i = 6, j = 4, k = 11 (5 blue, 6 red), l = 156 (27 South America, 2 Bellingshausen Sea, 8 Southern Australia, 11 Australia-New Zealand, 45 South Africa, 10 Kerguelen Islands, 51 New Zealand, 1 South Georgia, 1 Ross Sea).
Table 2.
Summary of the major distribution patterns of sponge species found at three or more locations within the Southern Ocean and neighbouring regions (also see Fig. 5).
Figure 6.
Depth distributions of sponges in the Southern Ocean.
All Porifera (a), and each class of Porifera: Calcarea (b), Demospongiae (c), and Hexactinellida (d).
Figure 7.
Depth ranges of each sponge family within their respective class.
Hexactinellida (a), Demospongiae (b), and Calcarea (c) in the Southern Ocean. Brackets after family name indicate firstly the number of genera within that family, and secondly, number of species within that family.
Figure 8.
Large scale biogeographic relationships in demosponge species assemblage in 3° by 3° grid cells from the Southern Ocean and neighbouring regions.
Each grid cell contains 3 or more species of demosponge. (a) Geographic representation of the relationships shown in c. (b) A simplified representation of the biogeographic relationships found in a. (c) Cluster analysis of the percentage faunal similarity between grid cells. The colours represent each geographic region: Antarctica (blue), South America (red), South Africa (purple), sub-Antarctic (yellow), New Zealand temperate (orange), New Zealand tropical (green), Southern Australia (dark pink), Tasmania (light blue), and SE Australia (light pink).