STREWTH!

Biggest Plant in the World—Three Times the Size of Manhattan—Found Off Australia

Researchers find 110-mile-wide seagrass meadow off Western Australia is actually a single plant around 4,500 years old.

Australian researchers have found what they reckon is the world’s biggest single plant: a patch of seagrass that’s 110 miles wide off the coast of Western Australia. Scientists decided to carry out genetic testing on a seagrass meadow in Shark Bay, about 500 miles north of Perth, to see how many separate plants it contained. “The answer blew us away—there was just one!” said Jane Edgeloe, a student researcher at the University of Western Australia who led the study. The researchers concluded that a patch covering about 80 square miles—three times the size of Manhattan—had spread like a lawn from a single seedling over an estimated 4,500 years.