XVI International Botanical Congess

Recent offshore, deepwater collections in the western Gulf of Mexico reveal a surprisingly rich marine red algal flora consisting primarily of species belonging to the Rhodymeniales-Halymeniales complex. The goal of this research is to characterise this flora based on comparative morphological evidence of vegetative and reproductive structures, and on sequence analysis inferred from chloroplast-encoded rbcL. The biogeographic affinities of these off-shore taxa will be discussed, and compared with the Gulf's intertidal species.