Did you know that there are around 250,000 different species of flowering plants?
250,000 🌺🌸🌻🌼🪷🌹🥀🪻🌷
But less than 80 of them live in the sea.
And they’re all species of seagrass.
Here’s five cool things you absolutely have to know about seagrasses:
🗺️ Seagrasses are found living in coastal waters of every continent except for Antarctica, partly because it’s quite chilly there.
🦖 Seagrasses didn’t always live in the sea. Between 70,000 - 100,000 million years ago (that’s during the Cretaceous period), seagrasses evolved from the same group of flowering plants that include wheat, ginger, and lilies. For the plant lovers, that’s the monocots group.
🧬 Seagrass can clone itself! In Shark Bay, Western Australia, the species Poseidon’s ribbon weed made a baby with a different species of seagrass (we don’t know which one). That single hybrid seagrass created new shoots from its roots to create a clone of itself. Then again. And again…. and again… and again! So much so, in fact, that it now spans some 180 kilometres! That makes it the largest known clone on Earth.
🧓 Seagrass can get old… really old. Off the coast of Formentera, Spain, one 15-kilometre-wide seagrass meadow could be between 80,000 and 200,000 years old! In contrast, the Shark Bay seagrass dates back just 4,500 years.
🔎 You can help researchers learn more about seagrasses (and help us take better care of them, too)! All you have to do is send photos of seagrass to Project Seagrass using their SeagrassSpotter App. You don’t have to be able to identify the species, but if you think you know what it is, you can give them that information, too. SeagrassSpotter