ABOVE: The three sponge species whose names were up for auction—now called (from left to right) Acanthella saladini, Higginsia johannae, and Haliclona roslynae
COMPOSITE IMAGE: CARINA SIM-SMITH (LEFT); CLEVE HICKMAN AND ANGEL CHIRIBOGA (MIDDLE AND RIGHT)
One autumn day in 2019, Michelle Kelly and Carina Sim-Smith were cleaning out the storage room of the Auckland marine lab where they worked. Among the floor-to-ceiling units of shelves brimming with jars of alcohol-preserved sea sponge specimens were a couple of long-forgotten plastic boxes packed with hundreds of jars. Peering inside, “Michelle was like ‘Oh my goodness. Cleve’s sponges,’” recalls Sim-Smith, a marine scientist at ClearSight Consultants.
Cleve is Cleve Hickman, a retired Washington and Lee University marine biology professor who had collected the sponges nearly two decades earlier during a scuba diving expedition in the Galápagos Islands. He had sent the specimens to sponge expert Kelly in New Zealand, but due to a ...
