Shark Bay, Australia’s World Heritage Site, is home to a variety of thriving seagrass-eating animals. It turns out that the seagrass known as Poseidon ice weed, or Posidonia australis, is a unique ancient plant species that has cloned itself over the past 4,500 years. Researchers from the University of Western Australia and Flinders University sample study of organisms were taken from across the bay and created a DNA fingerprint of 18,000 genetic markers. What they found was seagrass that stretched for 180 kilometers (112 miles) – the size of Cincinnati, about New York Times Note – Shark Bay’s is only a single tree.
Lead author Dr. Elizabeth Sinclair said they are often asked how many trees grow in seagrass meadows. As for Shark Bay, lead author and UWA student Jane Edgeloe said: “The answer surprised us – there was only one! That’s it, just one plant that has extended over 180 kilometers in Shark Bay. , making it the largest known plant on Earth.”
Posidonia seems to self-replicate by producing new shoots that grow from its root system. It doesn’t reproduce sexually, because it most likely won’t: The organism has a condition called polyploidy, which means it inherits 100% of its parents’ genome instead of just 50% from each. . Since polyploidy often leads to sterility, cloning may be the only way for Shark Bay Posidonia to proliferate.
However, Sinclair says its polyploidy can also make it more supple than usual. It could give organisms “the ability to cope with a wide range of conditions, which is a wonderful thing in climate change.” It remains to be seen whether Shark Bay Posidonia will continue to thrive in the face of modern climate change, but researchers may soon find out. They set up a series of experiments to find out how it survives in environments with variable conditions including a wide range of temperatures and salinities, as well as extreme brightness and darkness.
You can read the group’s article in Proceedings of the Royal Society of B.
All products recommended by Engadget are handpicked by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
