Fig. 1

COI maximum likelihood tree. Phylogeny of Demospongidae (colored branches) and Homoscleromorpha (black branches) based on 1,566 bp from the COI gene. Species possessing an intron in their COI CDS are marked in red. All other sequences are proven to be intron free except for AJ843894 Dragmacidon reticulatum, HQ379410 Axinella infundibuliformis and KJ008097 Cymbaxinella ^p sp.GL 2014, for which only the barcoding region has been sequenced. The horizontal black lines represent a schematic of the COI CDS and the colored vertical bars with numbers denote intron locations. Introns with degenerated homing endonuclease are indicated with a star. Sequences obtained in this work are indicated in bold and starred; the remaining sequences were downloaded from NCBI. ML bootstrap support/Bayesian posterior probabilities are indicated near the corresponding nodes. Branches with a ML bootstrap value below 50 % were collapsed