| Diagnosis |
Thalli erect, cartilaginous, greenish brown to dark brown, or purple in colour, attached by a small discoid holdfast. Branching basically repeatedly dichotomous and divaricate. Branches terete, 1.5 to 2.2 mm in diameter, tapered and characteristically bifurcate at the terminal portions. Thalli up to 14 cm in height (Ref. 80758). G. edulis often has a turf-forming growth habit, profusely branched but with short internodal distances, forming dense and interlocked mats of short (<50 mm) plants attached to hard substrate (Ref. 82232). At Navulivatu, Serua, Fiji, longer unattached plants were found, that formed balls and relied upon entanglement in seagrasses for attachment and were opaque khaki brown in colour. G. edulis and G. sp. had the thinnest thalli, being about 1.5 mm in diameter (Ref. 82232). |