A Comparison of Morphological Variation in Campylaephora borealis and C.crassa (Ceramiaceae, Rhodophyta)

Populations of Campylaephora borealis (Nakamura) Seo, Cho et Boo and C. crassa (Okamura) Nakamura show a year-around occurance of all life stages. Such a concurrency of life stages is disadvantageous to describe species in field. To trace the seasonal changes of the morphology, we quantified and analyized the morphology of two local populations using statistical character analysis. Life stage was correlated with the seawater temperatures in C. borealis, whereas the change of the life stage in C. crassa was correlated to the seasonal change of the biomass. Plants branched patently in a regular dichotomous manner with adaxial branchlets. The statistics showed that the seasonal change in morphology of C. borealis was significantly different from that of C. crassa in seven qualitative characters and five quantitative characters (p < 0.001), but seven quantitative features including tetrasporangial size were similar in two populations. The morphological difference in two populations could be fall into the annual variation of the branchlet number, the regularity of the occurrence and the variance of the branch subangle. KCI Citation Count: 0