World’s largest plant is a vast seagrass meadow in Australia

AP News ^ | June 1, 2022 | Christina Larson

[nickcarraway]

Scientists have discovered the world’s largest plant off the Australia coast — a seagrass meadow that has grown by repeatedly cloning itself.

Genetic analysis has revealed that the underwater fields of waving green seagrass are a single organism covering 70 square miles (180 square kilometers) through making copies of itself over 4,500 years.

The research was published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Scientists confirmed that the meadow was a single organism by sampling and comparing the DNA of seagrass shoots across the bed, wrote Jane Edgeloe, a study co-author and marine biologist at the University of Western Australia.

[nickcarraway]

[LukeL]

I have also heard of a group of aspen trees that are technically one organism.

[Stosh]

Apparently there are all kinds of these humongous critters around: “ Armillaria ostoyae, commonly known as the honey mushroom, is bigger than most animals, and is considered the largest and oldest organism on Earth. The mushroom covers 3,726563 m 2 of Malheur National Forest, Oregon, and is estimated to be around 8,650 years old.”

[Dogbert41]

I was going to say this too. And they’re trans-plantable. I used to dig out small saplings up in the mountains out back and plant them on our land and they spread there too. They are gorgeous in the fall.

[zeestephen]

Re: "a single organism covering 70 square miles"

Could be the official plant of the Democratic Party?

[Baldwin77]

Sounds like “kudzu” under water.

[riverrunner]

IF it was democrat it would be a weed.

[coloradan]

Clones of an organism are separate organisms. If you clone yourself, that person would look like your identical twin, possibly with an age difference depending on how old you were when the cloning was done, but you and your clone would be two separate organisms, not one organism. This is unlike the aspen tree stand, which are all connected by roots and are all part of the same organism. The way this article is written sounds like the seaweed is a bunch of different organisms, not one giant one.

[bobbo666]

Cloning itself does not constitute a single plant. If they are all interconnected (e.g., share the same root system), then OK. If not, just a wad of grass from the same ancestor.

[toddmoore]

Wait. What? Cloning is the process of producing individual organisms with identical or virtually identical DNA, either by natural or artificial means. By definition, this is not “the world’s largest plant” (singular, as if this meadow was one organism). It is a vast collection of individual clones.