Korean Species of Sargassum subgenus Bactrophycus J. Agradh(Sargassaceae, Fucales)with Key and Distribution

Early studies on Korean Sargassum subjenus Bactrophycus were partly started by Kyetzubg(1843,1849), J. Agardh(1889), Cotton(1906), Yendo(1907) and Okamura(1913, 1914, 1915, 1917). Kang(1966) reported 15 species and 4 subspecies of Sargassum subgenus Bactrophycus and their wide distribution on the Korean coasts in his paper [On the geographical distribution of marine algae in Korea], a foundation stone of Korean phycology. In fact, all the Korean coasts and subtidal zone are inhabited by Sargassum plants. They constitute the most part of the primary production and dominant species of benthic algal vegetation. In 1974, L.K. Lee began to study Sargassum monographically as seaweed resources in Korea. The Koreans eat some species of Sargassum (including Hizikia fusiformis) or use them as fertilizer of the farm near the coast. Among the reported 17 species of Korean Fucales, 12 species belong to Bactrophycus. Yoo(1976) dealt with the descriptions, figures, and a key of 24 species of Korean Fucales plants in her M.S. thesis paper. Among them 16 species belonged to Bactrophycus. Even though the above two works were done with thorough observation of the dry specimens kept in the Pusan Fisheries University Herbarium (most of them were identified by Kang, J.W.) and nation-wide collections, great morphological varieties of these taxa made Lee and Yoo hesitate to publish the paper. Instead, the serial chemotaxonomic studies on the geographical variations of Korean Fucales plants(Yoo and Lee, 1988a, 1988b ; Yoo, et al., 1988) were held to solve the problem, while foreign papers (especially both Drs Tseng's and Yoshida's serial works on Bactrophycus). and authenthic specimens that foreign scholors sent to Korean phycologists induced them to find that several species of Sargassum had been misidentified from the beginning. We introduce here Korean Sargassum subgenus Bactrophycus according to Tseng et al. (1985), mentioning briefly the characteristics of the species, key, and distribution on the Korean coasts.