| Stylissa flabelliformis | |
|---|---|
Scientific classification  | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Porifera |
| Class: | Demospongiae |
| Order: | Scopalinida |
| Family: | Scopalinidae |
| Genus: | Stylissa |
| Species: | S. flabelliformis |
| Binomial name | |
| Stylissa flabelliformis (Hentschel, 1912) | |
| Synonyms [1] | |
| |
Stylissa flabelliformis, known as the orange fan sponge, is found throughout the tropical oceans. It is usually shaped liked a Japanese fan hence its name. It feeds on plankton. In the wild it prefers to grow on rocky shelves. It is sometime but not often kept by hobby aquarists.
Sponges, the members of the phylum Porifera, are a basal Metazoa (animal) clade as a sister of the Diploblasts. They are multicellular organisms that have bodies full of pores and channels allowing water to circulate through them, consisting of jelly-like mesohyl sandwiched between two thin layers of cells. The branch of zoology that studies sponges is known as spongiology.
An ocean is a body of water that composes much of a planet's hydrosphere. On Earth, an ocean is one of the major conventional divisions of the World Ocean. These are, in descending order by area, the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern (Antarctic), and Arctic Oceans. The word "ocean" is often used interchangeably with "sea" in American English. Strictly speaking, a sea is a body of water partly or fully enclosed by land, though "the sea" refers also to the oceans.
Japanese people are a nation and an ethnic group that is native to Japan and makes up 98.5% of the total population of the country. Worldwide, approximately 129 million people are of Japanese descent; of these, approximately 125 million are residents of Japan. People of Japanese ancestry who live outside Japan are referred to as nikkeijin(日系人), the Japanese diaspora. The term ethnic Japanese is often used to refer to Japanese people, as well as to more specific ethnic groups in some contexts, such as Yamato people and Ryukyuan people. Japanese are one of the largest ethnic groups in the world.
