Last weekend I took a little stroll on my local beach in Flushing and had a quick look at the variety of red seaweeds washed ashore. I saw some that I did not know, some that I knew, and some that I thought I knew….

I have recently joined the facebook group ‘Seaweeds of the NE Atlantic‘ and so immediately asked the experts for some help in identification. It turned out that the only one I correctly identified was the one on the bottom right: Solier’s red string weed Soliera chordalis. This (invasive) species did well in the aquarium and so did the one on the top right, which I always thought was Dudresnay’s whorled weed Dudresnaya verticillata but it isn’t! It is actually Chrysymenia wrightii, which is also an invasive species. Moreover, my ID of the bottom left species was also wrong: not Fine-veined crinkle weed Cryptopleura ramosa but Beautiful fan weed Callophyllis laciniata (I should have known this as I have found crinkle weed in France this year…). The small flat seaweed on top is Cock’s comb Plocamium cartilagineum. The dark mop top left could not be identified based on this picture so I have to go back to take a better one. So dear reader be warned and take my identification of seaweeds in previous posts with a grain of (sea)salt!