A rod-shaped Gram-staining-negative, non-motile, aerobic and fucoidan-digesting strain, designated TC2(T), was isolated from marine algae collected from the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk at Abashiri, Hokkaido, Japan. The bacterium formed yellow, translucent, circular and convex colonies. Comparative 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis indicated that the strain belonged to the genus Flavobacterium, with the highest sequence similarities of 97.1 to 97.3 % to the type strains of Flavobacterium frigidarium, Flavobacterium frigoris, Flavobacterium limicola and Flavobacterium psychrolimnae. DNA-DNA relatedness values between strain TC2(T) and the above-mentioned species were lower than 28 %. The genomic DNA G+C content was 33.9 mol%. The major respiratory quinone was menaquinone-6 and the predominant fatty acids were iso-C(15 : 1) G, iso-C(15 : 0), iso-C(15 : 0) 3-OH and summed feature 3 (which comprises iso-C(15 : 0) 2-OH and/or C(16 : 1)omega7c). Strain TC2(T) could be differentiated from related species by several phenotypic characteristics. Thus, on the basis of these results, strain TC2(T) represents a novel species of the genus Flavobacterium, for which the name Flavobacterium algicola sp. nov. is proposed. The type strain is TC2(T) (=NBRC 102673(T) =CIP 109574(T)).