Egg Wrack Seaweed at Saints Rest Beach

Around the shores of the Bay of Fundy on the northeast Atlantic coast of Canada, where the highest tides in the world are experienced, the inter-tidal zone is correspondingly extensive. Where the beaches are bordered by steep-sided rock, seaweed grows to a great height and the fronds hang down in long curtains to meet seashore.

These photographs show one of the beaches where this can be seen: Saints Rest Beach in New Brunswick on the edge of Irving Nature Park. It was a rather bleak wet day in early June this year when the wrack, Egg Wrack (Ascophyllum nodosum), was sporting short, contrastingly yellow receptacles. These are stalked, warty, fruiting structures that release motile sex cells before falling off. Some of the stalks also bear attached the red seaweed Polysiphonia.

Parting the hanging strands of weed reveals the rock beneath. This is covered with encrusting pink algae and sessile barnacles. The rock itself provides evidence of the region’s glaciated past with a polished surface and striations made by the passage of ice sheets bearing a load of rocks and stones. The patchwork-patterned rock in one of the photographs is a consolidation of some of this glacial debris – possibly glacial outwash materials with interspersed layers of marine deposits.

See the earlier posts on Saints Rest Beach

… and more posts about Egg Wrack.

4 Replies to “Egg Wrack Seaweed at Saints Rest Beach”

This looks just like ‘pop wrack’ as our granddaughter called it, having discovered its delights on the beaches of Pembrokeshire aged ‘half a two’!

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Yes, this Egg Wrack seaweed grows on British coasts too. Pop Wrack is usually used here to describe Bladder Wrack (Fucus vesiculosus) which has much smaller air sacs that are easier to pop. The egg wrack bladders are usually over an inch long and quite tough – even if you stamp on them they don’t burst.

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