World's Largest Plant

An underwater image of the seagrass in Shark Bay in Western Australia.

CNN —  The world’s largest living plant has been identified in the shallow waters off the coast of Western Australia, according to scientists.

The sprawling seagrass, a marine flowering 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 research fellow at the School of Biological Sciences and Oceans Institute at The University of Western Australia.

That’s about the distance between San Diego and Los Angeles.

The plant is so large because it clones itself, creating genetically identical offshoots. This process is a way of reproducing that is rare in the animal kingdom although it happens in certain environmental conditions and occurs more often among some plants, fungi and bacteria.

“We often get asked how many different plants are growing in a seagrass meadow. Here we used genetic tools to answer it,” said Sinclair, the author of a study on the seagrass that published late Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“The answer definitely surprised us – just ONE! That’s it, just one plant has expanded over 180 km in Shark Bay, making it the largest known plant on Earth,” she said via email.  READ MORE...

Sugar Beneath the Ocean

Many coastal areas around the world are home to lush green meadows — all thanks to seagrasses.

As the only flowering plants growing in marine environments, these meadows are magic: One square kilometer of seagrass stores nearly twice as much carbon as land-based forests, and it does so 35 times faster. This makes seagrasses one of the most efficient global sinks of carbon dioxide on Earth.

And this isn't the only remarkable thing about them, a new study has revealed. Submerged beneath the waves, seagrass ecosystems hold colossal reserves of sugar we never knew existed before, with roughly 32 billion cans of Coca-Cola's worth of sweet stuff hiding in the seabed.

Naturally, this holds major implications for mitigating climate change and carbon storage.

Sweet, sweet seagrass
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, reported in a study published in the journal Nature Eco­logy & Evol­u­tion that seagrasses release colossal amounts of sugar into their soils, which is also known as the rhizosphere. Under the seagrass, sugar concentrations were unexpectedly at least 80 times higher than previously measured in marine environments.  READ MORE...