Sea Grass
Credit: © Rich Carey/Shutterstock

The world’s largest living thing has been hiding beneath the waves of Australia’s Shark Bay for thousands of years. But it is not some giant shark or other ancient nightmare—it is a patch of sea grass the size of a city.

Sea grass is a flowering ocean plant that somewhat resembles grass on land. It even forms large underwater meadows. Sea grass is different from seaweed, which is actually a type of algae.

Sprawling sea grass meadows carpet the bottom of Shark Bay, off the Western Coast of Australia. They serve as a habitat for fishes and other animals and grazing pasture for manatee-like dugongs. Recently, scientists conducting genetic studies of these meadows made a startling discovery.

The scientists, from the University of Western Australia, discovered that vast patches of Shark Bay sea grass are all clones of a single individual. Clones are offspring that are genetically identical to their parents. Sea grass clones itself by growing shoots from its root system that develop into new plants. These plants are capable of surviving on their own, but often remain interconnected. In many ways, the meadows function as a single individual—the largest organism (living thing) on Earth.

Similar discoveries have been made on land. In Utah, a colony of quaking aspen trees known as Pando shares a genetic identity and underground root system. The result is a single organism covering just over 100 acres (40 hectares) of land. A similar colony of mushrooms, known as the Humongous Fungus, covers more than 2,000 acres (800 hectares) in Oregon. Shark Bay’s monster meadow dwarfs these landlubbers at a staggering 50,000 acres (20,000 hectares). That’s about the size of the city of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Evidence suggests that the sweeping swath of sea grass is some 4,500 years old. The plant’s genetic makeup may hold the key to its longevity. The species, known as Poseidon’s ribbon weed, is actually a hybrid of two other plants, and it has two complete sets of genes. Such a condition, a form of polyploidy, is generally deadly in animals. But it can be harmless in plants or even beneficial. Scientists think that all those extra genes may have given the ribbon weed the genetic resources necessary to survive thousands of years of changing climate.

However, there’s no guarantee that the gargantuan grassland will continue to survive. Global warming is raising the temperature of Earth’s oceans, posing a threat to virtually every organism living there. Sea grass meadows may be a particular point of concern because, like coral reefs, they provide habitat for a wide variety of species, making them hotbeds of biodiversity (the diversity of living things).

Black-footed ferret in the wild
© Kerry Hargrove, Shutterstock

Have you ever wanted to clone yourself? Maybe you thought, “While I play video games, my clone can do all my chores!” Well, if you are a black-footed ferret, it’s your lucky day. (But, we’re pretty sure black-footed ferrets don’t play video games.)

In December 2020, the weasel world welcomed a cloned black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann. She became the first of any endangered native North American species to be cloned. In a few years, Elizabeth Ann might have siblings. The successful cloning is promising, because it offers hope that cloned animals could help save species from extinction. Extinction occurs when every member of a species of a living thing has died.

In the past, black-footed ferrets lived throughout much of the Great Plains. They depended on hunting prairie dogs for food and lived in the prairie dogs’ underground burrows. Since the late 1800′s, however, ranchers have eliminated prairie dogs from much of the Great Plains because they consider the animals to be pests. The black-footed ferret has become rare as a result of the decline in prairie dogs. Disease and the loss of rangeland to agriculture have also reduced the ferret’s numbers. Scientists once thought black-footed ferrets were extinct.

In 1981, ranchers in Wyoming discovered a population of more than 125 black-footed ferrets. Over the next several years, many of these animals died of a disease called distemper. To keep them from dying out completely, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Wyoming Game and Fish Department captured the remaining animals. Scientists have successfully bred the ferrets in captivity. In 1991, they began releasing captive-bred ferrets into western grasslands that were home to prairie dog populations. The ferrets began reproducing again in the wild.

The black-footed ferret is not the first animal to be cloned. Scientists used a technique called nuclear transfer to clone such amphibians as frogs and salamanders as early as the 1950′s. In 1996, a group led by the British scientist Ian Wilmut used the procedure to clone a sheep. The sheep was the first mammal cloned from a donor cell from an adult mammal. They named the clone “Dolly.” Since the cloning of Dolly, scientists from many countries have used a similar technique to produce clones of mice, cattle, cats, and other mammals.