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Seagrass carpet made from a single plant
Australian researchers have defined a giant seagrass plant - not to be confused with seaweed, which is an algae - off the coast of Western Australia as a single organism: The seagrass colony made from a single plant stretches 180 kilometers off the country's west coast and is estimated to be at least 4,500 years old. This was announced by the University of Western Australia and Flinders University in Adelaide in the scientific journal "Proceedings of the Royal Society B".
The plant of superlatives is the seagrass species Posidonia australis (also called Poseidon’s ribbon weed), as the staff of the University of Western Australia and Flinders University in Adelaide report in the journal "Proceedings of the Royal Society B".
The botanical wonder was discovered in the sea bay Shark Bay about 800 kilometers north of Perth, which is protected since 1991 by the UNESCO as world nature heritage. The marine scientists made the discovery by chance: the primary purpose of the research was to find out how genetically diverse a seagrass meadow is. Samples were taken and it was determined that the seagrass carpet is a single plant.
All samples genetically identical
"We are often asked how many different plants grow in seagrass beds, and this time we used genetic tools to answer that," said evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Sinclair. "The team collected seagrass shoots from numerous locations around the bay and created a "fingerprint" of 18,000 genetic markers," said first author Jane Edgeloe.
Then came the surprise: all the samples were genetically identical - making the growth a single coherent organism. "The result simply blew us away - there was only one plant, but it spans 180 kilometers," she says. The seagrass meadow probably evolved from a single colonizing seedling that kept spreading," Edgeloe said.
Given its enormous size, experts estimate the plant must have grown for about 4,500 years. The shallow environment of Shark Bay, with its sandy sediments, is ideal for clonal growth of seagrass beds, he said. But how the plant managed to survive for so long while still thriving is a mystery, he said.
Further studies will now clarify why the clone copes so well with changing environmental conditions. What is certain, the study says, is "that it has developed a resilience to variable and often extreme conditions that allows it to persist now and in the future."