Special Issue
Vol 142(3): November 2013
A Verification of Reports of Marine Algal Species from the Philippines
Put O. Ang, Jr., Sin Man Leung, and Mei Mei Choi
Marine Science Laboratory
School of Life Sciences, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong SAR, CHINA
ABSTRACT
Records of marine macroalgae reported from the Philippines were checked against AlgaeBase, the international database for algal nomenclatures, and Index Nominum Algarum (INA) Bibliographia Phycologica Universalis of the University of California at Berkeley Silva Center for Phycological Documentation to verify their present nomenclature, status of taxonomy and bibliographic reference. To date, 306 names of taxa (including species, varieties and forms) of greens (Chlorophyta), 234 names of taxa of browns (Ochrophyta, Phaeophyceae) and 751 names of taxa of reds (Rhodophyta), or a total of 1291 published names of taxa have been reported from the Philippines. Of these, 231 taxa representing 197 species in 20 families for green algae,
171 taxa representing 153 species in 10 families for brown algae, and 564 taxa representing 543 species in 52 families for red algae are considered valid records listed with their currently accepted names. All in all, 966 currently accepted taxa, representing 893 species in 82 families of marine macroalgae have been reported from the Philippines. Among the greens, 15 taxa have their type localities in the Philippines. This number is 40 for the browns and 33 for the reds. Proportionally, this is 6.5% of the total for the greens, 23.4% for the browns and 5.9% for the reds.
INTRODUCTION
Philippines is known for its rich marine flora. Over the years, several efforts have been attempted to compile and annotate the records of marine algae collected from the Philippines, including those by Silva et al. (1987), the two volume works by Trono (1997, 2004), and more recently, the checklist with a cut off date at 1999 by Ganzon-Fortes (2012). The last mentioned literature compiled a list of 949 algal species, including 61 Cyanobacteria, 212 Chlorophytes, 154 Ochrophytes (Phaeophyceaens) and 522 Rhodophytes. Several recent works since 1999 have contributed to the long list of Philippine marine algal records. Notable of these included the works of Geraldino et al. (2005) on Padina, Belleza and Liao (2007) on Caulerpa, Geraldino et al. (2010) on Hypnea and Payo et al. (2013) on Portieria.
With the extensive application of molecular techniques in studies on algal systematics in recent years, major revisions have been made in many groups of tropical marine algae. There is therefore a need to update the nomenclatures of Philippine marine algal records. This nomenclature validation is important to algal biodiversity, conservation and biogeographical studies in order to
provide a more accurate picture of floristic connection and the relatedness of Philippine flora with those of other neighbouring regions. The main objective of this current work is therefore to compile all known records of Philippine macroalgae from the literature till April of . . . . . read more
