World’s oldest marine plant discovered off Finland

It doesn’t look its age. At 1,403 years old, the oldest known seagrass bed has been discovered in Finland using a new method for determining the age of marine plants, the researcher who led the study told AFP on Friday, August 9.

By measuring the number of genetic mutations in seagrass meadows over time – which reproduce by cloning themselves endlessly – a team of researchers from Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States was able to determine the age of the ancestor of these plants with unprecedented precision.

Thanks to the method of“genetic clock”researchers studied 20 populations of eelgrass around the world before discovering the oldest known seagrass meadow in the Finnish coastal waters of the Baltic Sea. “This is the first truly reliable estimate of the age of a clone.”explained Thorsten Reusch, a researcher who led the study published in June in the online scientific journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Determining the age of plants provides revealing information about how ecosystems function and aging processes in the natural world, the researcher said. “It might even give us clues about how to manage aging in humans.”the researcher noted. In the future, he believes that even older aquatic plants, “10,000 years or more”could be discovered using this new method.