Student from B.C. names red seaweed after colourful movie director

Bridgette Clarkson titles new species as a tribute to Tim Burton’s ‘strange imagination’

By: Todd Coyne, Vancouver Sun, May 13, 2010, p. A5

Director Tim Burton has won many accolades during his successful career, but a B.C.-born researcher at the University of New Brunswick has honoured the filmmaker with an aptly bizarre tribute—seaweed.

Bridget Clarkston, a 29-year-old UNB doctoral student from Comox, decided to name the new species of red seaweed Euthora timburtonii as a tribute to the “similarly strange imaginations” she said she and the director share.

“I love The Nightmare Before Christmas and I love Tim Burton films because of his visual style,” said Clarkston. “His drawings are always a little bit dark, a little bit strange.”

Clarkston initially discovered the seaweed in 2007 off the coast of Bamfield, just across Vancouver Island from the beaches where she grew up. But Clarkston said that during the peer-review and verification phases since her 2007 discovery, the seaweed has also turned up in Tahsis, B.C., Friday Harbor, Wash., and even as far north as Haida Gwaii.

“There are lots of different types of red seaweeds in British Columbia—it’s very diverse compared to the rest of Canada,” said Clarkston on the phone from Fredericton. “The Pacific is much more diverse than the Atlantic … it’s an older ocean and there was a lot more time for species to evolve over there.”

Two weeks ago Clarkston sent letters to Burton, who is now judging at the Cannes Film Festival in France, by way of his agent and production company to alert them of her use of the director’s namesake. She has not yet heard anything back.

In the meantime, Clarkston already has two other new species and a whole new genus—a species classification—of red seaweed that she said she has discovered in B.C.

She has not yet submitted these species and genus for review but is confident that they are truly unique finds.

Clarkston plans to name her new genus Salishia, after Salish Sea, the alternate name proposed for the waters of the Strait of Georgia, Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where the new genus of seaweed species is found.

In keeping with the otherworldly, Burton-esque naming scheme, Clarkston intends to call one of these yet-to-be published species Pugetia cryptica.

The other she will name Beringia wynnei after one of Clarkston’s heroes and marine biology predecessors, American phycologist Michael Wynne.

Though still rare, according to Clarkston, new species discoveries such as these are made increasingly easy to verify thanks to initiatives like the Barcode of Life project led by researchers at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

“It’s a real Canadian-driven initiative to sequence a standard genetic marker for every species on the planet—all plants, animals, fungi, protists. It’s like a global survey of all species,” said Clarkston. “This whole species discovery aspect of my research is all part of that Barcode of Life initiative funded by Genome Canada and the University of Guelph.”