Last week I went for a little swim at the usual spot at Castle Beach. The viz was nowhere near as good as last month, but still OK. There are schools of sand eels and sand smelt and I even saw an eel. The contrast between growing brown seaweeds and withering red seaweeds has become even greater. Below you see some yellowed Harpoonweed and a ‘forest’ of Thong weed covered in epiphytes.
As the light was a bit subdued, I focused on the most shallow area. The bare parts of the rock are covered with barnacles, dog whelks, sting winkles and limpets. The seaweeds are mainly Serrated wrack Fucus serratus, Sea lettuce Ulva, Grape pip weed Mastocarpus stellatus, some Ceramium and Laver Palmaria palmata, as well as Dumont’s tubular weed Dumontia contorta. 
Tag Archives: Cornwall
Some Red Seaweeds
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!
st. agnes
Last Sunday I ventured to the north coast for a rock pool ramble with Matt Slater of the Cornwall Wildlife Trust (see this great blog) and the local marine conservation group (who also have a nice blog). I actually had never rock pooled at the north coast before (shame on me) and so it was nice to see this exposed habitat, quite different from my main haunts at Castle Beach in Falmouth and Trefusis Point in Flushing:
The rocks were much more bare and the number of animals a lot lower. However, there were quite some seaweeds. I finally saw (the edible) Laver Porphyra spp (probably Black laver Porphyra dioica):
Another edible species, Dulse Palmaria palmata, was incredibly common here:
I won’t add too many seaweed pics in this post, but I liked this shot of Serrated wrack Fucus serratus:
Brown and yellow Flat periwinkles Littorina obtusata (or possibly Littorina mariae, I did not bother to check) where common:
We found a Shore cling fish Lepadogaster lepadogaster and a Five-bearded rockling Ciliata mustela:
I found a couple of pieces of a branched seaweed covered in the bryozoan Electra pilosa:
All in all a good session. I hope to go back soon to take better pictures of the seaweeds!
Prussia Cove
We went to check out Prussia Cove (named after ‘the king of Prussia’ John Carter who used it as his smuggling base in the 18th century) this weekend for some snorkeling action:
The weather was great but there was quite a lot of wind and so the water was choppy and the visibility really bad. We saw hardly any fish. The seaweeds consisted mainly of the common Thong weed Himanthalia elongata and Bushy berry wrack Cystoseira baccata. There were not many rock pools. The only interesting find there was the pretty Brown tuning fork weed Bifurcaria bifurcata:
