Can You Tell The Largest Individual Organism?

[ireti]

I was having an argument with someone yesterday on what the largest living being would be. The argument was fun and I just enjoyed how we all shared knowledge and wanted to learn more. Now if I to ask you the question, what would be your response.

When we want to look at the definition of a living being, we always look at it on the individual level like a person or a large animal but then we humans are made up of several living beings including the microbes in our body like our gut microbe, what about the living cells in our body. Those ones are also living things as well, so we can say that we are a living being made up of numerous living beings in the trillion.

FLickr

What is your definition of largest living being? If we are to look at it in the perspective of length, then we can say that the Siphonophore is the largest living being since it can grow long up to 130 feet (40 m) which is bigger than a blue whale and it lives in the ocean. That makes sense I guess but what about height. If we are saying largest is defined by how tall the living being is, then the Coast Redwood would be the largest living being as it can grow as tall as 116 meters high.

wikimedia

If we are going to look at the number of land covered by a plant, then the Honey fungus will definitely be regarded as large as it covered about 10 square kilometer, weighing about 32,000 metric tons. The size of this plant is as a result of its root-like structure known as the Rhizomorphs which spread underground. So one plant can be very big and live long since the Rhizomorphs uses spores. The Fungus is often not seen until its time to reproduce then it appears as a mushroom.

Another large organism will be what we call seagrass and they can be very big. Interestingly, the size doesn't mean there are a lot of them, it could be just one organism. An example is Posidonia Australis (Posidon's Ribbon Weed) which is a clonal colony and would be regarded as an individual. The Posidonia Australis cover over 200 Square kilometer and this got it to get a Guiness world record as the Largest Clonal Colony of a marine plant.

Wikimedia

If I do not mention Aspens then I am not sure I have done justice to this post. Aspens are the most widely distributed trees from one tree organism. Aspens are connected underground by a giant shared roots which exchange water and nutrients among themselves ensuring that they all survive and this is because they are one organism. Each trunk visible outside are genetically identical to one another. Pando holds the title for the world's largest singular organism and this is because of its root and not the numerous trunk that exist.

If we are look at the largest organisms on earth, I do not think the elephant or the blue whale will meet the description but off course they hold records when it comes to mammals both on land and in sea. While we have a number of organisms that hold the title for the largest organisms currently, we still believe that there are some organisms that we haven't identify that are larger than these organisms that I have mentioned but until we find them, these are still the largest organisms depending on your preference, which could length, width, height, land area, mass, and so on.

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^Reference

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^{https://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/fishing/threatened-species
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/plants/pandohttps://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/animals-a-to-z/giant-siphonophore https://www.savetheredwoods.org/redwoods/coast-redwoods/ https://www.plantlife.org.uk/plants-and-fungi/honey-fungus-armillaria-species/ https://www.rhs.org.uk/disease/honey-fungus}

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