Seaweeds of the Southeastern United States: Cape Hatteras to Cape Canaveral
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Seaweeds of the Southeastern United States: Cape Hatteras to Cape Canaveral
569eBook
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Overview
The southeastern Atlantic coast is home to 334 species of seaweed flora. The greatest diversity occurs along the North Carolina coast between Cape Lookout and Cape Fear. With the exception of a few additional species south of Cape Fear, there is not a marked change in the flora until the more tropical waters and seaweeds of southern Florida. The barrier island system of the region and the enclosed shallow water sounds extend the miles of shoreline available for study.
This book, the product of a twenty-year collaboration, is the first comprehensive guide to appear in over seventy years and includes the addition of nearly one hundred species to the region, including twenty-five described by the authors.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822397984 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/11/1991 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 569 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Craig W. Schneider is Professor of Biology at Trinity College.
Richard B. Searles is Professor of Botany at Duke University.
Read an Excerpt
Seaweeds of the Southeastern United States
Cape Hatteras to Cape Canaveral
By Craig W. Schneider, Richard B. Searles, Julia S. Child
Duke University Press
Copyright © 1991 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9798-4
CHAPTER 1
HISTORY OF PHYCOLOGY IN THE REGION
Study of the seaweed flora of the mid-Atlantic region began in the mid-1800s when local naturalists sent specimens to experts, most of whom were in Europe. Some of these experts also visited the region, including the noted phycologist William H. Harvey from Trinity College, Ireland. In addition, information came from reports by people responsible for general surveys of the total flora. The situation began to change in the early 1900s as local colleges began to develop into major universities; phycologists were added to their faculties and they gradually developed the diversity of expertise in marine botany we now enjoy.
The first records of seaweeds in the region were published by Jacob W. Bailey (1848, 1851), a member of the faculty at West Point. He reported on plants sent to him from Charleston, South Carolina, by Lewis R. Gibbes and plants he himself collected on a trip to South Carolina and Florida. Bailey corresponded with several of the phycologists in Europe, with Harvey in particular.
Harvey was an oddity among the phycologists of his era, for he actually traveled abroad, personally making many of the collections on which he reported. Most of his colleagues, in contrast, remained in Europe and only processed plants collected and sent to them by resident overseas naturalists or those who were accompanying the voyages of exploration and commerce that were characteristic of the times. In 1850 Harvey traveled along the coast collecting seaweeds between Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Key West, Florida. In January, and again in March, he visited Charleston, South Carolina. There he collected seaweeds with Lewis Gibbes, a local collector who had previously sent specimens to him in Dublin. Harvey also received Charleston specimens from H. W. Ravenel and specimens from North Carolina from C. Congdon. The results of his observations on these plants were published in 1852, 1853, and 1858 as his Nereis Boreali-Americana; or Contributions to a History of the Marine Algae of North America under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. In this three-part tome he listed twenty-eight species from the region: two from North Carolina, twenty-four from South Carolina, and two not specifically from the region but from all parts of the American coast. One of the South Carolina plants was described as the new species Grateloupia gibbesii Harvey, the epithet honoring its collector.
The Reverend Mr. M. A. Curtis (1867) was the first local botanist to publish on the seaweeds of the region; he listed thirty-six species of red, brown, and green seaweeds as well as four blue-green algae in his catalogue of indigenous and naturalized plants of North Carolina. Some of the specimens remain from this early collection, and those that have not been found are readily assignable to common members of the flora. Sixteen of his collections were new records for the region.
J. Cosmo Melvill (1875) published a short account of collections he made in the Charleston area and in Key West, Florida, but within the region these included only three species not previously listed by Harvey.
Duncan S. Johnson of Johns Hopkins University visited the U.S. Fish Commission Laboratory in Beaufort, North Carolina, in June 1899. Based on observations he made there, he published (1900) an account of the algae of the adjacent sounds, listing fifteen species of seaweeds.
The single most illuminating account of the seaweeds in the region in those early days came from a professor of biology at Washington and Lee University, W. D. Hoyt. He collected plants primarily in the region surrounding Beaufort, North Carolina, in the years 1903-1909, but he also visited sites from Okracoke, North Carolina, through South Carolina to Tybee, Georgia. His description of 133 species, varieties, and forms of seaweeds and Cyanobacteria (1920) was more comprehensive than previous accounts for the region and indicated a diverse and interesting flora. Hoyt described the seasonality of North Carolina seaweeds and the overlap of tropical and temperate species that occurs just south of Cape Hatteras. In addition to working along the shore, Hoyt made two dredge collections from offshore in deep water; these were a preview of the rich collecting that would follow at offshore locations in later years.
A further contribution by Hoyt was his study of the reproduction and life history of local populations of Dictyota (Hoyt 1907, 1927). With cultured plants he demonstrated the alternation of their generations and observed a monthly periodicity in the formation of gametes in which eggs and sperm are released at the time of the full moon at flood tides. This pattern contrasted with the twice-monthly release of gametes in what was considered to be the same species, D. dichotoma, in European waters. Hoyt therefore recognized a new variety, menstrualis, which has only recently (Schnetter et al. 1987) been elevated as a separate species, in part on the basis of the differences noted by Hoyt. In addition to that variety, Hoyt described alone (1920) or together with M. A. Howe of the New York Botanic Gardens (1916) ten new species of algae based on plants from the region, most of them small and obscure epiphytic or endophytic plants.
In 1904 James J. Wolfe, a biologist who had studied algae for his Ph.D. at Harvard, was hired on the staff at Trinity College in Durham, North Carolina (later to become Duke University). A native South Carolinian, he was the first resident specialist on the algae in the region. At Beaufort, North Carolina, he followed up Hoyt's study of Dictyota with similar studies of the local species of Padina, P. gymnospora (as P. variegata). He demonstrated its alternation of generations and the genetic determination of male and female sexuality while disproving the suggestion that eggs developed parthenogenetically (1918). He died at an early age in 1920, leaving unfinished a monograph on the marine diatoms of the region.
Wolfe was followed at Duke University by the first chairman of its new Department of Botany, Hugo L. Blomquist, an eclectic systematist who published extensively on bryophytes and flowering plants as well as seaweeds. He authored a series of papers, mostly on ectocarpalean algae (Blomquist 1954, 1955, 1958a, 1958b), but started with an initial account (Blomquist and Pyron 1943) of seaweeds which drifted up on the beach near Beaufort, North Carolina, following a major hurricane in 1940; that account was followed by a listing of additions to the local flora of Beaufort (Blomquist and Humm 1946).
One of Blomquist's students, Louis G. Williams, made reciprocal transplant studies of local Codium "species," demonstrating that plants reported as C. tomentosum were ecophenic variants of C. decorticatum (1948b). Williams's greatest contribution (1948a, 1949) was a detailed study of the seasonal changes in the flora at the Cape Lookout jetty in North Carolina. These observations on seasonality expanded those made by Hoyt at nearby Beaufort. In an investigation of the algae on the "Black Rocks" off the North and South Carolina coast, Williams (1951) also published the first report of seaweeds in the region collected by divers.
During this same general time T. A. and Anne Stephenson were conducting the North American part of their worldwide descriptive investigation of intertidal communities. In 1952 they published an account of intertidal plants and animals of Charleston, South Carolina, and Beaufort, North Carolina, complementing Williams's intertidal studies.
Harold J. Humm, another student of Blomquist's at Duke University, later became part of the faculty. Humm demonstrated a variety of interests. During the 1940s he became involved in the wartime effort to find substitutes for the agar products which had previously been imported from Japan. He and others published a series of papers describing agar, local seaweed resources, and the suitability and characteristics of extracts from Hypnea musciformis and Gracilaria verrucosa (as G. confervoides; Humm 1942, 1944, 1951; Humm and Wolf 1946; Micara 1946; Causey et al. 1946; DeLoach et al. 1946a, 1946b). During the war a viable agar industry was centered in Beaufort, North Carolina, using locally collected Gracilaria as well as plants brought in from elsewhere along the East Coast.
In 1952 Humm described the flora on the intertidal rocks at Marineland, Florida, the only account of seaweeds from the coast of Florida north of Cape Canaveral since the visit of Bailey to Saint Augustine more than 100 years earlier. Several papers followed, written by or with students about the seaweeds of North Carolina (Aziz and Humm 1962; Earle and Humm 1964; Humm and Cerame-Vivas 1964; Aziz 1967).
William Randolph Taylor published two landmark books on the floras of the western Atlantic Ocean which in part covered the waters of the southeastern United States. The first, published in 1937 (revised in 1957), covered the seaweeds of the northeastern United States, and the second, published in 1960, concerned the seaweeds of the tropical and subtropical coasts from Cape Hatteras to Brazil. The mid-Atlantic coast of the United States lies at the edges of these two regions, and Taylor's books were therefore the greatest stimulus and aid to study of the local seaweeds since the publication of Hoyt's 1920 report.
In the early 1960s the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill added Max H. Hommersand to its staff, and he trained a number of students who contributed to the knowledge of the seaweeds of North Carolina and the region. Donald W. Ott investigated the marine representatives of the xanthophycean genus Vaucheria in North Carolina (Ott and Hommersand 1974); Carol Aregood (1975) studied the red alga Nitophyllum medium and placed it in a new genus, Calonitophyllum; Gayle I. Hansen (1977a, 1977b) completed a morphological and cultural study of another red algal genus, Cirrulicarpus, and in particular the local species carolinensis; Charles F. Rhyne (1973) investigated the biology of the local species of the green alga, Ulva, discovering that most plants belonged to two species not previously recognized as part of the flora; Joy F. Morrill (1976) included local Rhodomelaceae in her study of the dorsiventral members of that group; Joseph P. Richardson resolved questions about the ecology of the seasonal seaweeds Dictyota menstrualis (as D. dichotoma; 1979), Dasya baillouviana (1981), and Bryopsis plumosa (1982), which disappear during parts of the year; and Paul W. Gabrielson included regional members of the Solieriaceae in his extensive study of species in that family (Gabrielson 1983; Gabrielson and Hommersand 1982a, 1982b).
Humm moved on to the University of South Florida, and Richard B. Searles came to Duke University and trained several students who studied the local flora. Two of these—D. Reid Wiseman and James Fiore—began their studies with Humm. Wiseman's studies included a survey of the algae from South Carolina (1966, 1978); Fiore (1969, 1977) investigated the life histories of several brown algae, naming the new genus Hummia on the basis of some of those studies (1975). Nancy J. Alexander (1970) investigated the genus Enteromorpha on the jetty at Fort Macon; John F. Brauner (1975) made a seasonal investigation of the epiphytic algae on seagrasses in the Beaufort, North Carolina, area; and, somewhat later, Mitsu M. Suyemoto (1980) studied the crustose coralline red algae in the offshore waters of Onslow Bay.
Working with Searles, initially as a student, Craig W. Schneider began an investigation of the seaweeds in offshore waters, continuing the work started by Hoyt. Schneider, Searles, and their students combined to publish a series of papers expanding and refining the knowledge of the flora (Reading and Schneider 1986; Schneider 1974, 1975a, 1975b, 1975c, 1980, 1984, 1988, 1989; Schneider and Eiseman 1979; Schneider and Searles 1973,1975,1976; Searles 1972,1984b, 1987; Searles, Hommersand, and Amsler 1984; Searles and Leister 1980; Searles and Lewis 1982; Searles and Schneider 1990; Wiseman and Schneider 1976). Schneider also published monographic studies of the genera Audouinella (1983) and Peyssonnelia (Schneider and Reading 1987) from the region and described two new genera of red algae, Searlesia and Calliclavula. Searles described the endophytic brown algal genus Onslowia and the red algal genus Nwynea. Between them they described twenty-five new species of green, brown, and red seaweeds and with others expanded the known flora from the offshore waters of the region by ninety-nine species. In the process they provided the data for an analysis of the biogeographic relationships of the flora within the region and between neighboring regions and for the productivity of the offshore waters (Schneider 1975d, 1976; Schneider and Searles 1979; Searles and Schneider 1980; Searles 1984a).
Another Searles student, Paulette Peckol, conducted descriptive and experimental ecological studies of the deep-water algal communities on a rock ledge off Cape Lookout (Peckol 1982; Peckol and Searles 1983, 1984). She also made comparative physiological studies of deep-water and shallow-water seaweeds (Peckol 1983; Peckol and Ramus 1985).
In Georgia, Russell L. Chapman (1971,1973) published accounts of the marine algae of that coast, and Stephen M. Blair and Margaret O. Hall (1981) described a collection of plants from offshore South Carolina and Georgia waters. Searles, stimulated by the establishment of a small rocky area off the coast of Georgia as the Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary, published several papers (Searles 1981,1983, 1987; Searles and Ballantine 1986) and a field guide (1988) describing the offshore flora and several new species. Joseph Richardson, having joined the faculty at Savannah State University, published two papers (Richardson 1986, 1987) on the seaweeds of the near-shore waters of Georgia.
With the appointment of Donald F. Kapraun to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in the mid-1970s there was for the first time a marine phycologist who was a full-time resident at the coast. Kapraun turned much of his attention to the local flora and produced a series of papers clarifying the taxonomic concepts in difficult genera such as Polysiphonia. He used controlled culture conditions to study the physiological, cytological, and morphological characteristics of the plants (1977a, 1977b, 1978a, 1978b, 1978c, 1979; Kapraun and Freshwater 1987; Kapraun and Luster 1980; Kapraun and Martin 1987). He also used data from his cultural studies, which related temperature and light conditions to growth and reproduction, in a floristic analysis of the region (1980b). Kapraun and Zechman (1982) made a study of the phenology and vertical distribution of the seaweeds on the jetty at Masonboro Inlet. Kapraun's observations of the seaweeds along the coast and in the sounds of North Carolina were brought together in a two-volume work (Kapraun 1980a, 1984) describing that flora, the first such work since the pioneering publication of Hoyt. One of Kapraun's students, Charles D. Amsler, investigated the ectocarpalean algae of the region (Amsler 1983, 1984a, 1984b, 1985; Amsler and Kapraun 1985), comparing plants in culture with field-collected plants. He has contributed the section on the Ectocarpaceae in this book.
Work on the local seaweeds continues as a new generation of phycologists brings new techniques and insights to the study of seaweeds. Taxonomic studies are giving way to, or are being supplemented by, ecological, physiological, genetic, and cytological investigations using the wealth of species available. These investigations will ultimately lead to a clearer taxonomic and floristic understanding of the seaweeds of the region.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Seaweeds of the Southeastern United States by Craig W. Schneider, Richard B. Searles, Julia S. Child. Copyright © 1991 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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