When most Bermudians think of seaweed, they think of Sargasso Weed, the brown stuff that floats on the surface of the ocean, and washes up on the beaches after rough weather. It's good for fertilising the banana patch and not much else.

According to a Connecticut-based marine scientist, the reality is there are hundreds of different species of seaweed in Bermuda, very few of which float on the surface. As to whether its good for anything ? it turns out that seaweeds and algae power the marine food chain.

Dr. Craig Schneider, a marine biologist from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut was on the Island for a week in July to continue research for a book he is writing about seaweed in Bermuda.

He is already the author of 'Seaweeds of the Southwestern United States: Cape Hatteras to Cape Canaveral'.

"Other people go diving and look for fish," said Dr. Schneider. "I never even see the fish. I am looking for the algae. The things that I am looking at are up under crevices on beaches."

He admitted that occasionally he finds something nasty in a hole, but he usually checks to make sure there aren't any eels or lobsters.

Dr. Schneider has been quietly studying seaweeds for about 20 years. After writing about the seaweeds on the south-eastern coast of the United States, he thought that Bermuda was the next logical location, because it is the only island habitat offshore of Cape Hatteras and Cape Canaveral.

Dr. Schneider recently gave a talk at the Bermuda, Aquarium & Zoo about why there aren't more endemic species of seaweed in Bermuda.

"You have very few things here that are endemic," he said. "About one and half percent of the seaweeds here are unique to Bermuda only. You have had 50 million years of rocks and things to catch seaweed."

By comparison, other islands like the Galapagos Islands are 15 to 20 percent endomisms.

He blamed a "little" event called the Ice Age which caused a drop in temperature that killed off many species living in Bermuda, or prevented them from developing.

"So Bermuda has only had 10,000 years since the Ice Age to repopulate with seaweeds from the Caribbean," he said.

The Caribbean has sent us 450 to 500 species of seaweed, but very few species in Bermuda waters are unique to the Island.

"The problem is it takes a long time for things to happen," said Dr. Schneider. "You know that when a hurricane comes it rarely hits here. Think about that. It means that seaweeds that are floating being pulled by the Gulf Stream very rarely hit here. The only amount of time they have had to do that is 10,000 years when the water temperatures warmed up after the Ice Age."

Dr. Schneider decided to devote himself to the study of seaweed when he was an undergraduate.

"I had a teacher who had an infectious enthusiasm about things in the ocean, particularly the algae," he said. "I liked it and said maybe I should do this as a career. I went to graduate school at Duke University and studied under a famous fellow and started working in the Carolinas."

Since then, Dr. Schneider has taken up the seaweed mantle, and is passionate about his chosen subject. He has written several papers about Bermuda seaweeds, and will soon be ready to start his book.

"I have this wonderful job," he said. "Teaching is great, but then I have chances in the fall, spring or summer to come to Bermuda, do my fieldwork and take back oodles of material to work on in the lab. I have students who work with me in the lab. It is a wonderful job. There is nobody else in Bermuda who studies seaweed. This is my niche."

Since he has been studying seaweed in Bermuda he has noticed the disappearance of several types of seaweed.

"Pollution does threaten the seaweed," he said. "There are lots of things that have been reported for Bermuda since the turn of the century, that I know were here when I first started visiting. I can't find them now. The question is whether they naturally disappeared or whether they have changed to a new environment, or have they gone because of humans."

Aside from pollution, parrot fish are a particular vexation for Dr. Schneider, because they love to snack on seaweed.

"The parrot fish and other herbivorous fish eat everything," he lamented. "They eat what I want. The result is that I have to stick my hands up in holes and behind crevices and places that parrot fish can't get to."

He said a species that is minuscule in the presence of aquatic grazers will be unrecognisable without their influence.

"I go to places where there aren't parrot fish, such as Walsingham Pond," he said. "What I might find on the beach that would be tiny, would be twice as big in Walsingham Pond because it doesn't get nibbled away."

He once found a plant in a BAMZ tank of squid (which don't eat seaweed) that he thought was a well-known species. It wasn't until DNA work was done in the lab that he realised it was the same species he'd been finding on the reef in miniature.

"It was a beautiful little thing," he said. "In the tank with the squid they were allowed to grow without something nibbling away at them."

Seaweeds are photosynthetic which means they produce food from sunlight. They also absorb nutrients out of the water. They are not to be confused with seagrass which is more like grass on land. Unlike seagrass, seaweed does not have roots, although most species attach themselves to rocks. Seaweeds also lack moisture conductive tissue like land plants that draw moisture from soil.

There are only two types of seaweed that have floaters; one is the Sargasso Weed that Bermudians are most familiar with.

"This is how the Sargasso Sea got its name," said Dr. Schneider. "Sargasso is a floating habitat. There are fish that have fins that resemble these leaf-like structures on the Sargasso weed.

"There are small crabs that have rounded bodies that mimic the floats. There are a whole community of organisms that have adapted to it.

"Most seaweed don't have these floaters like the Sargasso Weed. Those are for an organism that would want to stay on the surface, whereas the attached ones stay under the water. When I went out to North Rock today, I was down at 50 feet. There was nothing that I found down there with floaters. The seaweeds were firmly attached to the rock."

Dr. Schneider said that seaweed feeds everything in the ocean.

"The fish and the things that eat seaweeds are then eaten by carnivores," he said. "The energy produced by the seaweed is great."

It would be impossible for Dr. Schneider to transport the seaweeds he finds in Bermuda back to Connecticut so he takes samples in two different ways.

"We take liquid samples with a little bit of preservative," he said. "We press lots of them onto paper. Then we take some and put them onto silica gel. That allows us to grind them up and take the DNA out and sequence it using modern techniques."

To find out whether the species has already been identified, the DNA sequence is put into a database called Genbank.

"So we have the best of both at work for us," he said.

When he returns to the United States he usually sends a sample of any new discoveries back to the BAMZ museum.

"Today, I saw about 30 species of seaweed around North Rock," he said. "Shallow subtidal seaweeds are totally different organisms than what you find 50 feet down."

He said plants found onshore are often twice as big offshore. Some of them have chemicals that give them a bad taste to fish like the parrot fish. These type suffer more from wave battering than fish nibbling.

"If you go out 200 feet, the plants are big and it is an absolute meadow," he said.

His favourite times to study seaweed are after hurricanes that have churned up the ocean, because seaweed growing in the deeper ocean are often torn up and tossed onto the shore. "It is really good after a storm," he said. "I was here a month after Hurricane Fabian. I was thinking there might be lots of things washing in, but I came too late."