History of phycology facts for kids

The history of phycology is the story of how people have studied algae over time. Humans have been interested in plants as food for thousands of years. We know that people have known about algae for more than 2,000 years! But it's only in the last 300 years that studying algae became a fast-growing science.

Algae in Ancient Times

People have studied botany (the study of plants) since ancient times. This is because humans have eaten plants since the very beginning. Some of the first times people tried to grow plants were around 10,000 BC in Western Asia.

The first mentions of algae are found in old Chinese literature. Records from as far back as 3000 BC show that the emperor of China used algae as food. For example, a type of algae called Porphyra was used in China by at least AD 533–544.

Algae were also mentioned in old Roman and Greek writings. The Greek word for algae was phycos, and in Latin, it was fucus. People even used algae as manure to help plants grow. One of the first coralline algae (which look like coral) to be known as a living thing was probably Corallina. Pliny the Elder wrote about it in the 1st century AD.

Early thinkers like Theophrastus (372–287 BC) and Aristotle (384–322 BC) tried to group plants. They simply called them "trees", "shrubs", and "herbs". Not much is known about botany during the Middle Ages; it was a quiet time for plant studies.

The study of algae grew slowly, much like other areas of biology. After the printing-press was invented in the 15th century, more people could read. This helped knowledge spread faster.

World Exploration and New Discoveries

As explorers traveled the world, they found many new plants and animals. Portuguese explorers in the 15th and 16th centuries wrote about algae in South Africa. However, it's not always clear which exact types of algae they were talking about.

The first marine plant from Australia to be written about was found by William Dampier. He collected it from Shark Bay in the 17th century. Dampier described many new kinds of Australian wildlife.

The 17th Century: A Scientific Awakening

The 1600s saw a big rise in scientific interest across Europe. With the printing press, many books on botany were published. John Ray was an important writer. In 1660, he wrote Catalogus Plantarum circa Cantabrigiam. This book started a new age in botany. Ray had a huge impact on how botany was studied and practiced in the late 1600s.

However, real progress in studying algae didn't happen until the microscope was invented around 1600. Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) used the microscope to discover bacteria. He also saw the tiny cell structures of plants. His observations, shared with the Royal Society, were a big step forward.

The 18th Century: Bringing Order to Nature

Before Carl von Linné (also known as Carl Linnaeus, 1707–1778), plants and animals had names, but they weren't organized. Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, doctor, and zoologist. He created the system we still use today for naming and grouping living things.

In his book Species Plantarum (1753), Linnaeus made the binomial (two-name) system popular. This system uses two Latin names for each living thing: one for its genus (a group of similar species) and one for its species (a specific type). For example, Homo sapiens for humans.

Linnaeus divided the plant kingdom into 25 groups. One group, called Cryptogamia, included all plants with "hidden" reproductive parts. This group contained ferns, mosses, algae (including lichens and liverworts), and fungi.

The first scientific description of a South African seaweed was Ecklonia maxima, published in 1757.

Knowledge of algae from the Pacific coast of North America began with Captain George Vancouver's expedition (1791–95). Archibald Menzies (1754–1842) was the botanist on this trip. He collected algae, which were later described by Dawson Turner (1775–1858).

A big boost for studying American algae came when William Henry Harvey visited in 1849–1850. He traveled from Florida to Nova Scotia and wrote three books called Nereis Boreali-Americana. This encouraged many others to study algae.

Early 19th Century: Algae Experts Emerge

Carl Adolph Agardh (1785–1859) was one of the most important algologists ever. He was a professor of botany in Sweden and later a bishop. He traveled widely and was the first to stress how important the reproductive parts of algae were for telling different types apart. Many algae species still have his name in their scientific names.

His son, Jacob Georg Agardh (1813–1901), also became a botany professor. He studied the life cycles of algae and described many new types. People sent him specimens from all over the world. Because of this, the plant collection (called a herbarium) at Lund University in Sweden is the most important algae herbarium in the world.

The first records of algae from the Faroe Islands were made by Jørgen Landt in 1800. Later, Hans Christian Lyngbye visited in 1817 and described about 100 new species.

Jean Vincent Félix Lamouroux (1779–1825) was the first to group algae by their color in 1813. At this time, people thought all coralline algae were animals. But in 1837, R. Philippi proved that coralline algae were plants. He gave them the new names Lithophyllum and Lithothamnion.

Freshwater algae are usually studied separately from marine (ocean) algae. Lewis Weston Dillwyn (1778–1855) wrote "British Confervae" (1809), one of the first books to gather all known information on British freshwater algae.

Anne E. Ball (1808–1872) was an Irish algologist. She exchanged notes with W.H. Harvey, and her findings are in his book Phycologia Britannica. Her collected algae specimens are still kept in museums today.

William Henry Harvey: A Leading Algae Expert

William Henry Harvey (1811–1866) was a very famous algologist. He was a professor of botany at Trinity College, Dublin. He traveled a lot, visiting South Africa, the Atlantic coast of North America, Australia (1854–1856), Ceylon, and New Zealand.

His travels in Australia led to one of the largest collections of marine plants ever. It also inspired many other scientists. Harvey published several important books:

• Nereis Australis Or Algae of the Southern Ocean (1847–1849)
• Phycologia Britannica (1846–1851)
• Nereis Boreali-Americana (1852–1858), which was the first and, for a long time, the only book on marine algae of North America.
• His five-volume Phycologia Australica (1858–1863) is still a very important reference for Australian algae.

Harvey's main collection of plants is at Trinity College, Dublin. But many of his specimens are also in other museums, like the Ulster Museum. Scientists back then often shared and traded specimens. This helped Harvey know a lot about where algae grew around the world. His books show how much he knew about algae found in different parts of the British Isles.

Sir William Jackson Hooker (1785–1865), a good friend of Harvey, was a botany professor and later director at Kew Gardens. Hooker saw Harvey's talent and encouraged him to write about algae for his own books, like British Flora.

Late 19th Century: More Discoveries and Collections

Many scientists did a lot of work in the late 1800s. The algae specimens they collected became very valuable. You can find Harvey's specimens in several plant collections, along with those of other algae experts.

In Germany, Friedrich Traugott Kützing (1807–1893) described more new types of algae than anyone before or since. His books, published from 1841 to 1869, greatly increased our knowledge of algae in cold Arctic waters. Some of his specimens are also in the Ulster Museum.

In 1883, Frans Reinhold Kjellman, a botany professor in Sweden, published The Algae of the Arctic Sea. He divided the Arctic Sea into different areas around the North Pole to study the algae there.

Other important work on marine algae around the world included:

• Charles Lewis Anderson (1827–1910) worked with William Gilson Farlow to create some of the first collections of North American algae.
• Edward Morell Holmes (1843–1930) was an expert on seaweeds, mosses, and lichens. People sent him specimens from all over the British Isles and other countries like Norway, Sweden, and Australia.
• George Clifton (1823–1913), an Australian algae expert, sent specimens to Harvey.
• W.G. Farlow became a professor at University of Harvard in 1879 and published Marine algae of New England and Adjacent Coasts.
• George W. Traill (1836–1897) was a clerk in Edinburgh but became one of the top experts on Scottish algae. He collected many specimens despite his poor health.

Mikael Heggelund Foslie (1855–1905) published many papers between 1887 and 1909. He greatly increased the number of known types of coralline algae. After he died, his collection was bought by a museum in Norway.

It was also in the 19th century (1867) that scientists finally understood the true nature of lichens. They realized that lichens are actually two organisms living together: an alga and a fungus. This helped clear up a lot of confusion in how plants were grouped. In 1859, Charles Darwin (1809–1882) published his famous book on evolution, On the Origin of Species.

The 20th Century: Modern Algae Studies

In the early 1900s, F. Børgesen continued his studies of algae in the Faeroe Islands and later the Canary Islands.

Between 1935 and 1945, Felix Eugen Fritsch (1879–1954) published his two-volume work: The Structure and Reproduction of the Algae. These books described almost everything known about algae at the time. While knowledge has grown so much since then that they can't be fully updated, they are still often referred to.

Other important books from the 1950s include Cryptogamic Botany by Gilbert Morgan Smith (1955) and Die Gattungen der Rhodophyceen by Johan Harald Kylin (published after his death in 1956). Elmer Yale Dawson (1918–1966) also wrote over 60 papers on algae from the North American Pacific seas.

Sharing Algae Knowledge with Everyone

Many books were published in the mid-to-late 1800s, showing how much public interest in the natural world grew. Books about algae were written by people like Isabella Gifford (1853), D. Landsborough (1857), Louisa Lane Clarke (1865), and S.O. Gray (1867). These books were written for "everyday" people, not just scientists.

In 1902, Edward Arthur Lionel Batters (1860–1907) published "A catalogue of the British Marine algae." This book listed where different algae were found around the British Isles. This started a new way of studying algae: bringing together records, detailed guides, and mapping where different types lived.

This process sped up in the 20th century. Lily Newton (1893–1981), a botany professor, wrote A Handbook of the British Seaweeds in 1931. This was the first book that helped people identify seaweeds in the British Isles using a botanical key (a guide with questions to help identify plants). In 1962, Eifion Jones published A key to the genera of the British seaweeds.

As research grew, scientists needed up-to-date lists of algae. Mary Parke (1902–1981) created a first checklist of British marine algae in 1953, which was updated several times. In 1964, Mary Parke and Peter Stanley Dixon (1929–1993) published a revised checklist, which was also updated. Later, in 2003, a "Check-list and Atlas of the Seaweeds of Britain and Ireland" was published.

This shows how quickly our knowledge of algae, at least in the British Isles, grew. It started with interested biologists and volunteers. Then came books with scientific names, followed by identification guides, and finally, detailed checklists and maps. This pattern of knowledge growth happened with birds, mammals, and flowering plants too.

Counting and Listing Algae Species

As more records were collected, it became important to gather all the information. Checklists were made and updated to get more exact numbers of different algae species. At first, these lists were very local. For example, in 1726, Threlkeld made the first list of Irish algae. In 1802, William Tighe listed 58 marine and 2 freshwater species from County Wexford.

Later, in 1836, Mackay's Flora Hibernica included 296 species. By 1908, Adams listed a total of 843 marine species for Ireland.

On a global scale, there are over 3,000 species of algae in Australia alone!

How We Identify Algae

As the study of algae grew, it became clear that identifying different species was not easy. Harvey's books, like Phycologia Britannica, didn't offer "keys" to help with identification.

In 1931, Newton's Handbook provided the first key to help identify algae in the British Isles. Eifion Jones wrote a key to British seaweed groups in 1962. Other scientists soon followed, creating more identification guides for different regions and types of algae. For example, Abott and Hollenberg published keys for California algae in 1976.

How Algae Are Grouped and Classified

Linnaeus's "sexual system" (1754) grouped plants based on their flowers. Even though it was artificial, it helped scientists fit new plants into the known groups. He put plants with "hidden reproductive organs" into the Cryptogamia group. Linnaeus recognized 14 groups of algae, but only four of them (Conferva, Ulva, Fucus and Chara) are still considered algae today.

As more and more species were discovered, scientists realized Linnaeus's system wasn't perfect. So, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, many new groups of algae were described. J.V.F. Lamouroux was the first to group algae by their color in 1813. However, other botanists didn't use this idea much.

It was Harvey who, in 1836, divided algae into four main groups based on their color:

• Rhodospermae (red algae)
• Melanospermae (brown algae)
• Chlorospermae (green algae)
• Diatomaceae

Later, in 1883 and 1897, Schmitz further divided the red algae (Rhodophyceae) into two main groups. Today, algae are arranged into many different Orders based on their characteristics. For example, the red algae (Rhodophyta) include Orders like Bangiales and Corallinales. The green algae (Chlorophyta) include Ulvales and Bryopsidales. The brown algae (Heterokontophyta) include Laminariales and Fucales.

Recently, some scientists have suggested a new Kingdom called Protoctista for algae and other simple organisms. However, many scientists have not fully accepted this idea yet.

See also

• Algae
• Botany
• History of biology
• History of botany
• List of botanists