Literature review of sponge-microbe interactions on sixteen characteristics of 82 sponges.

This dataset compiles information from a literature review (Freeman et al., 2021) of seminal and recent papers focusing on sponge ecology and sponge-microbe interactions. Data (when available in the literature) on sixteen characteristics of 82 sponge species from diverse subclasses are included. These data include enumeration of overall microbial abundance (High and Low Microbial Abundance: HMA and LMA), chemical defense allocation patterns and overall palatability in feeding assays, nutritional quality (carbohydrate, protein, lipid, and energy content), physical characteristics (tensile strength, ash content, tissue density), photosymbiont abundance (chlorophyll a concentration) physiology and metabolism (pumping rate, NOx production), nutrition (% of carbon derived from dissolved organic matter, detritus, and living particulate organic matter), and microbial symbiont diversity (expressed as the inverse Simpson's index).