The plant was discovered in Shark Bay in Western Australia, when researchers were trying to determine which plants should be collected for seagrass restoration.
"We often get asked how many different plants are growing in seagrass meadows and this time we used genetic tools to answer it," said Elizabeth Sinclair with the UWA Oceans Institute, a senior author of Rachel Austin via UWA
The researchers sampled seagrass shoots from across Shark Bay and realized the shoots all came from just one plant, not multiple."The answer blew us away – there was just one!" said UWA student researcher Jane Edgeloe, lead author of the study."That's it, just one plant has expanded over 180km in Shark Bay, making it the largest known plant on earth.
"Even without successful flowering and seed production, it appears to be really resilient, experiencing a wide range of temperatures and salinities plus extreme high light conditions, which together would typically be highly stressful for most plants," Sinclair said. The researchers are now doing experiments in Shark Bay to understand how this plant survives and thrives under such variable conditions.
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