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Species of red algae named after Michael J. Wynne
Monday, March 05, 2012
A new species of red algae was named after Michael J. Wynne, curator emeritus of the U-M Herbarium (Algae) and professor emeritus of botany, namely, Beringia wynnei.
The red-bladed alga has a type locality of Bamfield, Vancouver Island, Canada. The article by Bridgette Clarkston and Gary Saunders, her Ph.D. advisor, appeared in the January 2012 issue of the journal of Phycologia.
Clarkston, of the University of New Brunswick and now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, got to know Wynne at scientific meetings. Because Wynne did a fair amount of work on the algae of Alaska, especially on Amchitka Island in the Aleutians, she emailed him with questions about determinations and nomenclature, and he was always happy to help.
“Even though I have been retired now for a few years, I continue to come in to my office in the Herbarium, often seven days a week,” Wynne said. “Each day is different, with emails from all over and often requests to review manuscripts.”
Wynne has other species named in his honor: a Botryocladia from Puerto Rico by David L. Ballantine, a Hypoglossum from Hawaii by Isabella A. Abbott, and a Chylocladia from Salina Island, north of Sicily, by Giuseppina Alongi, Mario Cormaci and Giovanni Furnari, as well as the red algal genus Nwynea (N. grandispora) from offshore Georgia by Richard B. Searles. Wynne is an algal systematist and over his career has described a total of 25 new genera and 91 new species of marine algae from around the world.
“I feel very honored and humbled when someone names a new species after me,” Wynne said. “When you get the sense that your peers appreciate your efforts, you want to keep doing what you are doing.”
Image: Beringia wynnei.
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