Since 2011, a monstrous structure has taken shape in the Atlantic Ocean almost every year, sprawling from the West African coast to the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt—a gargantuan bloom of a brown free-floating seaweed. In May, the seaweed belt hit a record biomass of 37.5 million tons. In a study […]
A ‘Real Super Female’: 310-Mile Stretch of Seaweed May Be World’s Biggest Clone
Researchers previously believed that a small, bushy seaweed in the Baltic Sea belonged to a species called narrow wrack. New research reveals they’re actually individuals within a giant seaweed clone—perhaps the largest clone known to science. In a study published February 17 in the journal Molecular Ecology, University of Gothenburg researchers disproved the previous assumption […]