Sponges of the New Caledonian lagoon - IRD

14
Sponges
of the New
Caledonian
Lagoon
John Hooper is Senior Curator of the Queensland Museum, Brisbane. He commenced
studies on sponges in 1981, working firstly in the northwestern Australian region,
subsequently in various parts of southeast Asia, Micronesia, southwest Pacific
islands and more recently along the length of the east coast of Australia. He is
currently attempting to comprehensively document the northeastern Australian tropical
and subtropical sponge faunas in collaboration with commercial pharmaceutical
interests, and in orchestrating a publication project to make sponge taxonomy
available to the non-specialist community. His main research interests concern the
exploration of (prospecting fOr) sponge biodiversity, particularly the coral reef and
inter-reef faunas; documenting the heterogeneity in sponge distribution patterns
throughout tropical Australasia; tinkering with ideas about the biogeography of
sponges throughout the Indo-west Pacific; and publishing on the systematics of the
orders Poecilosclerida, Axinellida and Halichondrida in particular.
Michelle Kelly-Borges is a Senior Scientist at UNITEC Institute of Technology,
Auckland, New Zealand, and is also currently a consultant to the Coral Reef
Research Foundation in Micronesia. Her main research interests lie in the reproductive
and benthic ecology of common reef sponges, the molecular, morphological and
biochemical systematics of tetractinomorph sponges, especially the desma-bearing
"lithistid" families, and sponge genome structure and characterisation. She has
extensive field experience in sponge populations from both the Caribbean and
northwest and southwest Pacific island regions, and is presently involved in the
establishment of a commercial bath-sponge aquaculture industry in Micronesia.
Claude Levi is a membre correspondant of the French Academy of Sciences. He
was Director of the Laboratory of Biology of Marine Invertebrates, Museum national
d'histoire naturelle, paris, France. He has mainly studied development, metamorphosis,
normal and experimental morphogenesis and taxonomy of tropical and bathyal
sponges.
Jean Vacelet is Director of Research CNRS at the Centre of Oceanology of Marseille
(Station Marine d'Endoume), University of the Mediterranean, Marseille. He has
studied the taxonomy, biology and ecology of sponges in the Mediterranean and
various tropical seas, including extensive field observations, since 1956. His main
interests are in sponge reproduction, cytology, skeletogenesis, symbiosis with
micro-organisms, the fauna of submarine caves, and exploitation of commercial
sponges (including pathology and culture), and in particular studying recent hypercalcified
sponges ('sclerosponges'), relicts of the once Widespread main Mesozoic and
palaeozoic reef builders (sphinctozoans, stromatoporoids, chaetetids).