Researchers in Hawaii used structures that mimic coral reefs to study aquatic life -- and they found four new species.
The new species are all types of sponges, "grubby little" creatures that are often overlooked but play a critically important role in coral reef communities, one of the researchers said.
"They live down in the cracks and crevices, sort of cementing all of the structure together and filtering the water," Rob Toonen, a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told McClatchy News on Jan. 9.
They also help create food for other organisms, he said.
"Before Jan started his work here, there were about 55 species of sponges known from all of the Hawaiian archipelago. He has 200 to add to that list. (He's) literally sort of quadrupling the known number of species in Hawaii," Toonen said.
Sponges are traditionally hard to identify, Toonen said, but Vicente and the team used DNA and the sponges' skeletons.
Three of the new species -- Haliclona pahua, Haliclona kahoe and Haliclona loe -- are new to science, Toonen said. They were found in Kaneohe Bay off the island of Moku o Loe, he said, and their names come from Native Hawaiian stories, according to the paper.
"Lo'e," for example, "was the sister of three brothers who kept honesty within the family," the paper said.
The other new species, Gelliodes conulosa, was previously misidentified as a "broadly distributed sponge that was all over the place," Toonen said.
But, "it turns out it was not part of that group, it's its own species," he told McClatchy News.
Researchers used autonomous reef monitoring structures to collect the sponges. They're "basically a stack of plates that have all of these caves all through (them) that allow sponges to have the same type of habitat that they would have deep down in the reef," Toonen said.
For a long time, sponges "were sort of relegated to a weird group that a lot of people weren't really paying attention to," he said.
But, "sponges are important and cool," he said.
"We're starting to realize that coral reefs ... function because there are sponges in them," Toonen said. "As we're starting to find out more about sponges, we're starting to realize how incredibly important they are to maintaining an ecosystem."
The research team also included Emily Rutkowski, Dennis V. Lavrov, Gabrielle Martineau and Molly Timmers.