"[...] But researchers have today revealed there's a plant about 4,500 years old and measuring 180 kilometres across living right under our noses in Western Australia.
Genetic testing has revealed that what was once thought to be part of a giant seagrass meadow in the shallow waters of Shark Bay, near Carnarvon, was actually a single massive clone of Posidonia australis seagrass
[...] "We were a bit suspicious because the plants around there don't act like normal seagrass," Dr Breed said. "They don't flower as much, don't seed as much, so these signs of reproductive activity were a little bit unremarkable."
But when they took samples from 10 meadows throughout the Shark Bay area, they never expected nine of them to return a genetic match.
Instead, they were planning to use their research to inform which plants to use for restoration of the meadows, to help with their resilience against threats like bleaching...
[...] Being a clone probably helps to explain why this single plant has been so successful.
[...] Polyploidy in this case has occurred because at some stage, a Posidonia plant has hybridised with another related species.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday June 03 2022, @12:40PM
Polyploidy to me just means having more than one copy of each chromasome in each cell. Are polyploids somehow forbidden from cloning?
Why would hybridising necessarily change the ploidiness? (Inventing new words proves that I'm advancing science.)
To me they seem orthogonal concepts, but to be honest I know bugger all about cellular biology. I just know that the ones without walls or chloroplasts taste better.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2022, @01:18PM (3 children)
How so? Didn't work out that well for the Gros Michel.
If being clones = successful for multicellular organisms there wouldn't be so much sex in the world.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 03 2022, @01:26PM (1 child)
Maybe they got it backwards, and it's closer to the truth to say that a clone of this age and size was obviously successful. That's why it is still here and large and in charge: superior genetics. But not necessarily superior because it was a clone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2022, @03:48AM
(Score: 4, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday June 03 2022, @02:03PM
There are fish which clone too. The clones take over an optimal environment until disease or predators hit the population, then they fall back to sexual reproduction and eventually some variants find that they are in an optimal situation, at which point the clones do better. In that one, the sexual reproduction is used for generating fit gene pools and the asexual reproduction for speed in taking over an environment [nih.gov]. It is likely similar for the sea grass.
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