The world’s largest plant has been discovered outside Australia – VG

According to the researchers, genetic tests show that they have discovered the world’s largest plant – a giant seagrass meadow that stretches over 200 square kilometers off the west coast of Australia.

And we’re not talking about a lot of different seaweed. No, it’s the same plant that has grown large. very big.

It’s the British newspaper Watchman which discusses the surprising finding of researchers at the University of Western Australia, among others, which has been published in Proceedings of the Royal Society b.

But it wasn’t done overnight to cover an area three times the size of Manhattan or 20,000 football fields. It takes approx. 4500 years old.

The underwater bed, called Posidonia australis, can be seen in Shark Bay outside Western Australia. Here, the plant, which originally comes from two different seaweeds, has found ideal growing conditions.

Dear children, this plant has many names, this plant is also called gang weed and fibrous weed, thus living up to the phrase “grow like weed”.

When the researchers began looking for genetic differences in the samples they took in different places in the Gulf, they got a real surprise. Although they were taken to a distance of up to 180 km, everything indicates that there was no talk of many different plants, but One And the same.

– We thought «What h.. Is this happening here? We were absolutely stunned, says Dr Martin Breed, an ecologist at Flinders University, according to The Guardian.

Jane Idjello, a student and researcher at the University of Western Australia, says they looked around 18,000 genetic markers to see if they could find species differences that they could use in the projects.

But what they found was that it was the same plant that spread through the roots, just like strawberry plants with their buds.

The 200-square-kilometer meadow appears to have been sprouted from a single colony seedling, says Edgeloe.

This party is now home to turtles, dolphins, manatees, crabs and fish.

The ground stems of this weed grow up to 35 cm per year, and at this rate, the researchers estimate that the plant must have used at least 4,500 years to spread over such a large area.

It does well in Shark Bay although the salinity varies greatly and the temperature here ranges between 15 and 30 degrees.