Two new shallow-water species of Haliclona from north-eastern Brazil (Demospongiae: Haplosclerida: Chalinidae)

Haliclona is an unusually species-rich genus in Porifera, with more than 400 species described. In spite of many subgenera used in the taxonomic housekeeping of these sponges, over half of them remain unassigned to a subgenus, thus encouraging a wide range of redescriptions and taxonomic revisions of materials from all around the world. In this paper, we describe two new Haliclona spp. collected at Pernambuco, Alagoas and Bahia States (north-eastern Brazil, between 08 degrees 46'S and 13 degrees 56'S). Haliclona (Reniera) chlorilla sp. nov. is a dark green or black coloured, delicately-branched species; and Haliclona (Soestella) peixinhoae sp. nov., a beige-coloured, tubular species, where tubes frequently bear large thorns and possess a conspicuous sub-superficial meandering reticulation. These species highlight the importance of including ex-situ collections in compiling baseline data, as both were already present in scientific collections by the 1980s and 1990s.