DNA analysis revealed, seaweed forest stretches more than 500 km in the Baltic Sea is a copy of a Bladderwrack seaweed.
A copy of Bladderwrack seaweed in the Baltic Sea once thought to be a separate species. Image: Lena Bergstrom
The team at Gothenburg University, Sweden, discovered that the former creature was thought to be a unique Bladderwrack seaweed of the Baltic Sea is actually a huge copy of the common Bladderwrack seaweed (Drone bladder), Science Daily On 4/3 reported. New research has been published in the magazine Molecular Ecology.
In the brackish water of the Baltic Sea, Bladderwrack seaweed is popular because it is one of the few seaweed with low salinity. They grow in large forests from the water to a depth of 10 m. Fish, snails and crustaceans thrive here, making the forest an interesting object for scientists to study.
When the DNA sequence, the research team found that a small, dense seaweed in the Baltic Sea was once said to be a separate species – Narrow Wrack – essentially just a copy of Bladderwrack. Bladderwrack seaweed has separate male and female trees, often creating new individuals after sexual reproduction.
However, the copy of the Baltic Sea adds more by dispersing the pieces of the original tree according to the lines and develops into new individuals. This copy stretches more than 500 km along the beach of Bothnia Bay, from Oregrund in Uppland to south of Umea, and may be the largest copy in the world, considering the entire organism.
“This copy consists of millions of individuals and in some areas, it is completely dominated, while in other places, it develops and the Bladderwrack individuals are sexually reproduced. We have found some large copies in the Baltic Sea, but the copy of the seaweed offshore Bothnia Bay, Sweden, is the largest copy,” Ricardo Pereyra, a member of the research group, Gene, for the Genes Group.
Seaweed copies face the precarious future because the Baltic Sea is influenced by climate change. Without continuous sexual reproduction, they will have little adaptation and genetic change. “The copy is almost completely lacking in genetic mutations, which means lacking individuals in the population capable of adapting to changes and maintaining the existence of the species,” said the Kerstin Johannesson Marine Professor at Gothenburg University, the main author of the study.
Bladderwrack seaweed provides shelter and food for many organisms. Therefore, if seaweed cannot adapt, the risk of these organisms is wiped out. The study of genetic mutations and the complexity of seaweed species in the Baltic Sea can help prevent this consequence, allowing conservationists to better understand how to manage them when the environmental conditions change.