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 that 310 miles (500 kilometers) of algae in the Baltic Sea were narrow wrack seaweed. Genetic analyses revealed that they are not only a different species—common bladderwrack—but also a giant clone, which has implications for the species’ resilience to threats like climate change. A clone is a genetically identical copy of an organism, naturally resulting from asexual reproduction. In this case, the researchers discovered that fragments of an original female bladderwrack plant gave rise to new cloned populations across more than 310 miles (500 kilometers) of the Bothnian Sea (a northern part of the Baltic Sea ... Read full article.