Three new species of carnivorous deep-sea sponges from the DIVA-1 expedition in the Angola Basin (South Atlantic)

DIVA 1 is the first in a series of expeditions dedicated to the study of benthic diversity in the deep sea of the Atlantic Ocean. On RV “Meteor” we collected samples along a transect of about 700 km in the Angola Basin. The collection of Porifera from this expedition is composed of 50 specimens or in some cases pieces of specimens collected at depths between 5162 and 5460 m. This work concerns only carnivorous sponges of which we collected 16 specimens belonging to four species. Here we describe three new species: Chondrocladia levii sp. nov., C. vaceleti sp. nov., and C. nicolae sp. nov.; we also found another species, C. cf. guiteli Topsent, 1904 recorded for the first time from a very far abyssal basin (NW of the Galician coast). The main distinctive features of the three new species are the anchorate isochelae categories, the number of teeth on each, and the presence/absence of sigmas; C. levii has three unguiferous isochelae classes with 5, 5, and 9-10 teeth, respectively; C. vaceleti has two unguiferous isochelae classes with three teeth each; C. nicolae has only one unguiferous isochelae category with three teeth. The habitus of C. nicolae (orange in colour) is also very different from that of most of the known Chondrocladia species.