The World's Largest Plant Is a Self-Cloning Sea Grass in Australia (nytimes.com) 17
In Shark Bay, off the westernmost tip of Australia, meadows of sea grass carpet the ocean floor, undulating in the current and being nibbled on by dugongs, cousins of Florida manatees. A new study revealed something unexpected about those sea grasses: Many of them are the same individual plant that has been cloning itself for about 4,500 years. From a report: The sea grass -- not to be confused with seaweed, which is an algae -- is Poseidon's ribbon weed, or Posidonia australis. Jane Edgeloe, a University of Western Australia Ph.D. candidate and an author of the paper, likens its appearance to a spring onion. Ms. Edgeloe and her colleagues made their discovery as part of a genetic survey of Posidonia grasses in different areas of Shark Bay, where she SCUBA dived in the shallow waters and pulled up shoots of Posidonia from 10 different meadows. On land, the researchers analyzed and compared the grasses' DNA.
They published their results Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It turned out the DNA of many of those seemingly different plants was virtually identical. Elizabeth Sinclair, also of the University of Western Australia and an author of the study, recalled excitement in the lab when she realized: "It's only one plant."While some of Shark Bay's northern meadows reproduce sexually, the rest of its Posidonia clones itself by creating new shoots that branch off from its root system. Even separate meadows were genetically identical, indicating that they were once connected by now-severed roots. Based on how old the bay is and how quickly sea grasses grow, the researchers surmise that the Shark Bay clone is about 4,500 years old.
They published their results Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It turned out the DNA of many of those seemingly different plants was virtually identical. Elizabeth Sinclair, also of the University of Western Australia and an author of the study, recalled excitement in the lab when she realized: "It's only one plant."While some of Shark Bay's northern meadows reproduce sexually, the rest of its Posidonia clones itself by creating new shoots that branch off from its root system. Even separate meadows were genetically identical, indicating that they were once connected by now-severed roots. Based on how old the bay is and how quickly sea grasses grow, the researchers surmise that the Shark Bay clone is about 4,500 years old.
likens its appearance to a spring onion. (Score:2)
But is it tasty?
I'd want me some 4500 old onion.
Cloning? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not sure "cloning" makes it the biggest. This is literally one single plant, not lots and lots of clones. They may look like individual plants above, but there is a single root system. This is similar to Aspens. More similar to Bermuda grass probably (yes, many lawns may be one single plant). If one of them broke away and drifted to a new location and it had a separate root system, then I would call that a clone.
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If you remove a big swath of it from the middle, is the disconnected part a clone?
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Plus, aren't the large Aspen clonal colonies huge by comparison and much older? Pando is thought to be much older than the sea grasses talked about in this article.
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Plus, aren't the large Aspen clonal colonies huge by comparison and much older? Pando is thought to be much older than the sea grasses talked about in this article.
As the article points out:
- Pando is about 80 football fields
- The 'Humungous Fungus' is 3.5sq miles, and
- The Shark Bay clonal Sea Grass is 77 sq miles.
Weight-wise, no estimate is given for the seagrass, but you'd have to think 77 sq miles would weigh a bit. As to age, no one knows how old Pando is. Could easily be older than the ~4500yrs suggested for the seagrass.
Grass Down Under (Score:4, Funny)
The main question of interest is: In what manner is it trying to kill you?
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downvote - the "everything trying to kill you" bit the yanks peddle isn't funny..
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downvote - the "everything trying to kill you" bit the yanks peddle isn't funny..
Yes it is, because it's true! When we had 30 acres inland of Lennox Head, we were in the habitat of the top three venomous snakes in the world, by LD50: Inland Taipan, Eastern Brown, Coastal Taipan. The Red-bellied Black snakes that were hiding under things by the shed didn't even get counted. And all of that paled into insignificance in light of the sausage rolls down at the local shop/post-office.
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Went on a short trip to Broome and beautiful Cable Beach. Fantastic - except that you can't enter the water due to venomous jellyfish and crocodiles.
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Interestingly (Score:3)
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And it's pretty easy to get to. Just follow the path down from Spider Mountain through Murderbird Rainforest. Once you've got through Snake Valley, and swum across Crocodile Estuary, you're there.
Safety warning: Don't forget your SPF 50+ sun block and hat, the Australian sun can be brutal.
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You forgot the short walk through the Desert of Certain Death
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This is bananas! (Score:2)
Rather a lot of garden plants can only be propagated by using cuttings, as all sexual reproduction means they lose the special trait that made them desirable in the first place - the colour changes, the scent vanishes, etc. So there are vast numbers of cloned plants
In particular, consider bananas - IIUC a single clone, the Cavendish, dominates production (until it too succumbs to disease like it's predecessor, the Gros Michel). And banana cultivation covers entire countries.
Twins? (Score:2)
So... twins are largest human. They have the same DNA, right?
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if it were 77 square miles of conjoined twins, sure. these sea grasses are all connected. one root system, one organism.