External characters
thickly encrusting, short projections occasionally erect on surface.
Colour
rusty red colour in life; unknown colour on deck; dark brown in ethanol.
Skeletal Characters
| Oscules | conspicuous, discrete, apical on erect projections, perhaps with siphon extending along side of projection before apex, with raised membranous lip; oscules not visible in preserved specimens. |
| Texture | soft, compressible. |
| Surface_Ornamentation | opaque, membranous, optically smooth; uneven, with irregular, bumpy surface overlying small clumps of fibres which barely project through surface and visible only in preserved specimens where surface membrane has collapsed. |
| Ectosomal_Skeleton | membranous, unarmoured, regularly pushed up into complex conules by clumps of several fibres; membrane darkly pigmented, highly collagenous. |
| Choanosomal_Skeleton | fibrous; irregular reticulation of fibres; fibres possibly dendritic, cored fully with sand detritus; mesohyl collagen dense, highly granular, contains rare fine sand detritus. |
| Megascleres | nil. |
| Microscleres | nil. |
| Mudmap_Author | J Hooper |
| Mudmap_Editor | K Hall |
Distribution
In French Polynesia: Marquesas archipelago is.
Pacific Ocean: Australia, Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga, Palau
China sea: Malaysia
Ecology and habitat
On rocky slope.
J Hooper (2014). QM2027 Aplysinella rhax (de Laubenfels, 1954). In: Hall, K.A. & Hooper, J.N.A. (2014) SpongeMaps: an online community for taxonomy and identification of sponges. (Available at http://www.spongemaps.org).
