“We have been studying cool water seagrasses in southern Australia for a while, to understand how much genetic diversity is in them and how connected the meadows are,” Sinclair tells CNN’s Katie Hunt. It is “arguably the world’s largest living organism,” writes Kate Golembiewski for the New York Times.Īs part of a survey, researchers collected samples from ten seagrass meadows across Western Australia’s Shark Bay, about 500 miles north of Perth, and studied 18,000 genetic markers to test how many different plants grew in the area. “It’s the largest known example of a clone in any environment on Earth,” co-author Elizabeth Sinclair from the University of Western Australia tells New Scientist’s Alice Klein. The plant, called Poseidon's ribbon weed or Posidonia australis, is about 4,500 years old, according to a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Scientists have discovered the world’s largest plant-a seagrass in Australia that grew more than 70 square miles by repeatedly cloning itself.
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