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Freshwater red algae of the world. Shigeru Kumano. 2002. 375 pp. Biopress Ltd, The Orchard, Glanage Road, Bristol BS3 2JX, UK. 97.00 or L59.00, + L6.00 p.&p. [ISBN 0-948737-60-3]
When I collected my first freshwater red alga, over 20 years ago, I skimmed through Bourrelly's (1970) encyclopaedia of freshwater algal genera, without knowing much French, and then progressed to Starmach's (1977) compilation of freshwater red algae from Europe and beyond, without knowing any Polish but thankful for his English key. My eventual recognition of Composopogon developed into a passion for freshwater red algae which I still hold today. At that time, I read that Skuja (1938) had estimated there were almost 200 species of freshwater red algae. Nearly 50 years later (Sheath 1984), the number of accepted species was 178. In the last few decades there has been a flourish of taxonomic discovery and description, and this excellent compilation by Shigeru Kumano includes just over 200 species, in English.
The author has done extremely well in extracting those published names with enough description and/or illustration to allow them to be, more or less, clearly defined. There are probably 400 or so published names of taxa in the Batrachospermales alone, but many are synonyms and some of are not described well enough to warrant inclusion in a book of this kind. It was clearly, and sensibly, not the author's intention to reappraise the taxonomy or re-examine material, so some validly published names (e.g. Batrachospermum patens Suhr, B. durum C. Agardh) are not mentioned. One major omission on the nomenclatural front is the absence of B. delicatulum (Skuja) Necchi & Entwisle, B. fennicum (Skuja) Necchi & Entwisle, B. suecicum (Kylin) Necchi & Entwisle and B. americanum (Kutzing) Necchi & Entwisle from the synonym lists. These new combinations were included in a re-evaluation of the generic and subgeneric classification of Batrachospermaceae by Necchi & Entwisle (1990). Appropriately, for now, they should be treated as synonyms in the genera Sirodotia or, for the latter, Tuomeya....