The plant is called Poseidon’s Ribbon Weed. A fitting name for the world’s largest. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Researchers from the University of Western Australia recently stumbled across a happy little accident: they found the world’s largest plant.
The plant, which is basically an enormous seagrass meadow, consists of 112 miles of an Australian seagrass clone. The researchers were studying how many plants were in the seagrass meadow in Shark Bay when they made the discovery. They were stunned to find that, instead of multiple varieties of seagrass, the entire meadow was just one massive plant.
Shark Bay is a World Heritage Site and the plant is called Poseidon’s Ribbon weed. It’s now the largest known clone in any environment on Earth.
“The answer blew us away – there was just one!” said Jane Egeloe of UWA in a statement. She’s the lead author on a paper about the plant published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. “That’s it, just one plant has expanded over 180 kilometers in Shark Bay, making it the largest known plant on earth. The existing 200 square kilometers of ribbon weed meadows appear to have expanded from a single, colonizing seedling.”
The researchers first began looking at the area when they were tasked with assessing the genetic diversity of seagrass meadows in Shark Bay. Using 18,000 markers from seagrass shoot samples taken around the bay, they expected to find multiple different plants.
It’s a bit of a puzzling find, though. Since it’s just one giant plant, researchers expected that it would be vulnerable to the drastic environmental changes we’ve seen the last few decades. Strangely, the plant appears to be doing just fine, despite its lack of genetic diversity.
“It experiences a huge range of average temperatures; from 17 to 30 °C,” said co-author Dr Martin Breed, an ecologist from Flinders University, in a statement. “Salinities from normal seawater to double that. And from darkness to extreme high light conditions. These conditions would typically be highly stressful for plants. Yet, it appears to keep on going.”
