Native Hawaiian Seaweeds in Partnership with Kendra Hart By: Kendra Billie

Two native Hawaiian seaweeds Rhodophyta These plants are thick and are 2-60 cm tall. Their branches cylindrical to 3 mm in diameter. They form thick clumps. Their colors are yellow in sun and dark reddish brown in shade. Chlorophyta These plants have 15 cm high branches that are covered in small bead-like branchlets.They have light to bright green in color. Attaches to substrate by creeping runners that are often branched. It forms mats up to 4 cm thick.

Rhodophyta habitat Rhodophyta forms bands at where low and high point of the tides between the area of the shore in locations with heavy wave exposure. They attache to basalt rock that can form thick mats or may only be found in cracks and crevices. They are mostly abundant in Hawaii, Maui, Kaui, but rare on Oahu.

Chlorophyta habitat These most green Chlorophyta are aquatic and are found commonly in freshwater and marine habitats some are terrestrial, growing on soil, trees, or rocks. Some are symbiotic with fungi giving lichens.

Rhodophyta Rhodophyta are one of the oldest groups of eukaryotic algae, and also one of the largest, with about 5,000–6,000 species of mostly multicellular, marine algae, including many notable seaweeds. Other references indicate as many as 10,000 species more detailed counts indicate about 4,000 in about 600 genera.

Chlorophyta Chlorophyta is division of green algae which is also called chloropytes. It refers to a group of all green algae called Viridiplantae which includes about 7,000 species of aquatic photosynthetic eukaryotic organisms. The clade Streptophyta consists of two divisions and the division contains unicellular and multicellular species.

Kendra Hart Kendra enjoys classes in biological and environmental sciences. Then, she became the president of Botany Club and was often integrated in teaching others about a variety of plants. Kendra was part of NOAA climate change research fellowship. In 2013, she graduated at NAU with a B.S. in Biology.

Kendra’s science Over the past year, she has worked and studied growing native Hawaiian seaweeds aquaculturally to ultimately help protect their wild population. So Kendra is developing a thesis around how recent climate change factors may or may not affect algae communities species around the big island.