Some algae from my herbarium!
A few fun facts:
- Alaria marginata, also called winged kelp, can grow up to 13 feet! It's a Pacific kelp, and you can find it from Alaska down to California! You can also eat it c: as long as you have an algae-gathering permit
- Nereocystis lutkeana, also known as bull kelp, is an annual algae, and can grow up to 36 ft. That means they manage to grow huge, reproduce, and die each year! They're a huge ecosystem engineer, and one of the main species that make up kelp forests on the eastern side of the Pacific (or the west coast of North America). You can make them into pickles!
- Prionitis is also called bleach weed! There are many different species and they can look really similar, but lanceolata is common in my area. It is called bleach weed because, as you might guess, it lets off a smell like bleach, or sometimes iodine! This is thought to be a deterrent for predators, but man when I tell you I picked one hundred isopods out of this to press it.
- Callophyllis is really hard to get down to species!! It looks a lot like Chondrus crispis, or Irish sea moss, but while they are in the same order, they're not even the same family! But you can eat both of them! Mine is covered in diatoms, which are also algae.