Sargassum

 

Friend Nancy picked me up this morning.  First we had breakfast downtown and then went flower shopping.  My go-to flowers are geraniums and alyssum.  However, I had received a generous gift certificate from neighbors last year for a local nursery so thought I'd try experimenting w/ other plants.  Nancy dropped me back off at my place around 2:30 and then she made it home just in time to join Friend Kathy Novey and I for our weekly Zoom meeting.  Kathy is dealing w/ a different kind of plant.  She lives on the Texas coast and sargassum is being pushed ashore.   The only thing I know about sargassum comes from one of my fav poems Rime of the Ancient Mariner (we read it in highschool and the teacher used it to also teach us a little geography, biology, and history at the same time).  Kathy sent me this picture of a sprig of sargassum showing the little green bladders which keep the plant floating on top of the ocean plus a little Blue Button called Porpita porpita.  The Blue Button is described as a jellyfish but is more like a Portuguese Man-O-War which is a colony of hydroids.  Wasn't sure what a hydroid was so went looking to see which phylum it belongs to.  Turns out it's in Cnidaria. Not much help since there was no phylum called 'Cnidaria' when I was learning them in high school biology.  Got on-line and found out instead of the 11 phylum I memorized 50 some years ago there are now 35.  I need to go back to the basics.