Cloning is not some fanciful science fiction invention. Humans clone plants all the time, and plants clone themselves all the time. One such self-cloning plant is a type of seaweed called bladderwrack.

Researchers from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, who published their work in the scientific journal Molecular Ecology, found that over 310 miles of bladderwrack in the Baltic Sea is made up of clones derived from a single female bladderwrack, making it the largest cloned organism known to science.

Bladderwrack, other than being a word packed with Lewis Carroll-like whimsy, is a species of seaweed that usually reproduces sexually by releasing eggs and sperm into the water. This one bladderwrack bundle reproduced asexually; hence, all of its derivatives are genetically identical.

If you’re wondering how it can do that, here is an excerpt from Wikipedia that has too many big marine biology words for me: “Asexual reproduction in Baltic Sea populations is accomplished by the production of adventitious branches that come loose and reattach to the bottom by the formation of rhizoids.” The dorkiest among you just slapped your foreheads and mumbled “of course” while the rest of us are nodding politely and moving on.

This clone that came from a single female bladderwrack then spread thanks to the sea currents, which dragged fragments far and wide. While this has shown the bladderwrack’s incredible resiliency and survivability, cloning reduces genetic diversity. You might remember diversity being a big concern in Norway after over 27,000 salmon escaped from a farm and into the wild.

A whole lot of the same bladderwrack means the seaweed may not be able to fight off diseases or handle rapidly changing conditions as well as a more genetically diverse seaweed. As water temperatures rise thanks to climate change, genetic diversity might be the key to survival for many sea creatures.

It would be nice if the Baltic Sea’s cloned bladderwrack defied its shortcomings and survived, though, seeing as it’s home to countless sea creatures. It is, after all, essentially a massive forest beneath the sea in which a wide variety of sea life live, hunt, and reproduce.