Table 1. Overview of the results of quality filtering, chimera detection and analysis for all sponge samples.

Total sponge samples	8
Total raw sequences	300,801
Sequences below length requirement	29,314
Sequences violating homopolymer limit	36
Sequences passing quality filtering	271,451
Putative chimeric reads	5,939
Final high-quality sequence count	265,512
Avg. reads per sample	33,189
Final number of OTUs	9,444
Unique phyla detected	18