A Pelagic Sargassum from the Western Atlantic

Taylor, Randolph

In the course of an exhaustive study of the animal associates of the pelagic Sargassa of the Sargasso Sea, Gulf Stream and West Indies, Mr. Byron F. Morris of the Bermuda Biological Station has at various times found, intermixed, parts of drifting plants which had a littoral origin, but in addition has found a very tiny species which he recognized as peculiar and called to my attention a couple of years ago. Mr. Morris has most kindly turned the material over to me for study and report. This plant occurs very sparingly in the netted hauls of Sargassa, but over the period since first noticed many individual specimens have accumulated. As the method of collecting by a net towed from a vessel in a series of hauls favored pooling of several net loads from a general area, no specific spot in the ocean can be designated as the type locality. The early series of hauls derived from the waters off the east side of Bermuda, -but a recent lot came from more southerly waters, east and south from Puerto Rico. Sargassum is a hazardous genus in which to offer new taxa, for very many often variable species have been described, and for many of these a surplus of varieties and forms. Grunow studied the genus exhaustively, and his monograph, in which a vast number of entities are listed, was published (1915, 1916) after his death. I find nothing there corresponding to the plants here reported, and they do not find a place in my general account of the Western Atlantic warm water algae (1960), though they had been seen and cursorily reported by Winge (1923, p. 24, fig. 8). On the authority of Yendo, Winge tentatively ascribed these plants to S. myriocystum J. Ag., a substantially different plant of the Indian and western Pacific Oceans, but that is an allocation which I cannot accept. There is a slight resemblance to S. polycystum C. Ag., in the form secured from Banka near Sumatra by G. v. Martens, referred by Grunow to f. festiva (Grunow 1915 p. 444), but that plant is reported to be far larger, and is looser in habit, with abundant foliage in the specimen available for comparison.

A Pelagic Sargassum from the Western Atlantic

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