What's in a name?

 

 

 

Sargassum is a brown macroalgae found in temperate and tropical waters.  With over 300 species, the genus Sargassum is best known for its planktonic species, which drift in free-floating mats. Portuguese sailors originally named the species after a seaweed found in their native waters, the wooly rock rose, or sargaço in Portuguese.  The Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean was named after the seaweed.

Sargassum muticum, more commonly known at Japanese wireweed, was scientifically described in 1955 by D. E. Fensholt.  It had previously been described by Kichisaburo Yendo  near the beginning of the 1900s but was reclassified.The genus, Sargassum, comes from  the aforementioned Portuguese sailors. The species name, muticum, means without a point, awnless (having bristle-like appendages), from the Latin muticus, destitute of a terminal point.  The word often refers to the beard-like growth on grasses, whose pattern is echoed by the blades on Sargassum muticum.