Discover the world’s largest factory in Australia

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The largest neighborhood in the world A plant has been identified in shallow waters off the coast of Western Australia, according to scientists.

The sprawling seaweed, a flowering marine plant known as Posidonia australis, stretches for more than 112 miles (180 kilometers) in Shark Bay, a wilderness area protected as a World Heritage site, said Elizabeth Sinclair, a senior researcher in the College of Biology. Institute of Science and Oceanography, University of Western Australia.

This is about the distance between San Diego and Los Angeles.

The plant is so large that it reproduces itself, creating genetically identical branches. This process is a method of reproduction that is rare in the animal kingdom although it does occur in certain environmental conditions and occurs more often among certain plants, fungi and bacteria.

“They are often asked how many different plants grow in a seagrass meadow,” said Sinclair, author of A Study on seaweed published late Tuesday In Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“The answer certainly surprised us – only one! That’s it, only one plant has been expanded over 180 km in Shark Bay, making it the largest known plant on Earth.”

Sinclair and her colleagues sampled 10 sites across the Shark Bay seagrass meadow range in 2012 and 2019. The research team also measured environmental conditions including depth, water temperature and salinity.

“We’ve been studying cold-water seaweeds in South Australia for a while, to understand how much genetic diversity they are and how closely related the meadows are,” Sinclair said.

Scientists managed to sequence the DNA of seaweed samples, which He revealed that it was a single plant.

“The plant was able to continue growing through vegetative growth – extending its roots (root stems) outward – the way a buffalo grass would be in your back garden, extending the runners outward. The only difference is that the seaweed roots are located It’s under the sandy sea floor, so you don’t see it, just the buds inside the water column,” she said.

“The most interesting thing is that it has twice as many chromosomes as the other populations we were studying. She has 40 and not the usual 20,” she added.

Seaweeds live in seacoasts and estuaries worldwide.

The study suggested that reproduction by cloning helped seagrass meadow adapt to habitat conditions Which were more extreme than where seaweed is usually found – more salty water, higher levels of light and large fluctuations in temperature.

Sinclair said the seagrass meadow covered nearly 200 square kilometers (77 square miles or 49,000 acres) — larger than Brooklyn. This is a much larger area than Pando shakes the aspen trees in Utah, which is often described as the largest plant in the world. The clone is spread over 106 acres, and consists of more than 40,000 individual trees, according to the USDA Forest Service.

The researchers said that the seagrass of Shark Bay is about 4,500 years old, but it is ancient, but its age does not break records. a Discover Posidonia oceanica in the western Mediterranean that extends up to 9.3 miles (15 km) may be older than 100,000 years.

“Seaweed clones may persist almost indefinitely if left undisturbed, because they depend on horizontal rhizome expansion, rather than sexual reproduction,” Sinclair said.