The coral killing sponge Terpios hoshinota in Kimbe Bay, Papua New Guinea

Abstract

The coral killing cyanobacteriosponge Terpios hoshinota was initially described from Japan and Guam following an outbreak in 1984 (Rützler & Muzik 1993), but since then has expanded its range to other areas, including Taiwan (Liao et al. 2007), Australia (Fuji et al. 2011), Indonesia (de Voogd et al. 2013, van der Ent et al. 2016), Malaysia (Hoeksema et al. 2014), the Maldives (Montano et al. 2015) and Mauritius (Elliot et al. 2016). Terpios hoshinota encrusts a wide range of coral species and outbreaks cause mortality over large areas of reef (Rützler & Muzik 1993). Outbreaks may be devastating on local scales, but reefs can recover, even when the sponge co-exists in the area for 25 years (Reimer et al. 2010) and of course outbreaks can reoccur (Yomogida et al. 2017)