the.com/seagrass
The ocean's only flowering plant, quietly out-carboning forests while nobody claps.
means A flowering plant that lives entirely underwater in shallow coastal seas, forming meadows that shelter fish and stitch the seabed together with roots.
from Plainly compound: 'sea' + 'grass,' a descriptive English coinage naming the plant for what it resembles, grass-like blades swaying in salt water. It isn't actually a grass botanically, though it belongs to the same larger flowering-plant lineage, nor seaweed, which is algae; it's a true flowering plant (with roots, veins, even flowers and seeds) that evolved from land ancestors and returned to the sea tens of millions of years ago. The name is humble, but the plant's resume — carbon storage, nursery habitat, coastline stabilizing — wildly outperforms its grassy little label.
- carbon capture
- Stores carbon 35x faster than rainforest soil
- not seaweed
- Has roots, flowers, and seeds like land plants
- ancient age
- Some meadows are over 100,000 years old
- nursery role
- Shelters a fifth of the world's biggest fisheries