Australian biggest plant

The seagrass, a marine flowering plant known as Posidonia australis, stretches for more than 112 miles (180 kilometers) in Shark Bay, an Australian ...

A Posidonia oceanica plant discovered in the western Mediterranean "The plant has been able to continue growing through vegetative growth -- extending its rhizomes (rootstalks) outwards -- the way a buffalo grass would in your back garden, extending runners outwards. "We often get asked how many different plants are growing in a seagrass meadow.

Researchers were stunned when they discovered a species of seagrass had effectively cloned itself and covered nearly 80 square miles.

A severe heat wave in 2010 and 2011 sparked widespread damage to the Shark Bay meadows, killing about a third of the seagrasses. Her team hypothesised that thousands of years ago, a single seagrass seedling landed in the bay. When her team visited an area known as Shark Bay, a relatively pristine landscape untouched by development, they went beneath the waves to collect samples of seagrass to see what types of plants were growing across the ocean floor.

Seagrasses are marine plants which produce flowers, fruit, and seedlings annually, like their land-based relatives. These underwater seagrass meadows grow in ...

Seagrasses protect our coasts from storm damage, store large amounts of carbon, and provide habitat for a great diversity of wildlife. “The result blew us away: it was all one plant. One single plant has expanded over a stretch of 180 km making it the largest known plant on Earth.” Scientists from the University of Western Australia and Flinders university initially thought the plant was a meadow of different sea grasses. The world’s largest plant - a seagrass the size of 28,000 soccer fields - has been discovered off the coast of Australia. More than 4500 years ago, a single seed planted in the sun-drenched waters of what is now the World Heritage Area of Shark Bay in WA.

The plant was discovered in Shark Bay in Western Australia, when researchers were trying to determine which plants should be collected for seagrass restoration.

The researchers sampled seagrass shoots from across Shark Bay and realized the shoots all came from just one plant, not multiple. "That's it, just one plant has expanded over 180km (111 miles) in Shark Bay, making it the largest known plant on earth." The plant, "an ancient and incredibly resilient seagrass," stretches 111.847 miles and is at least 4,500 years old, according to a news release.