Tambarikosy

Past the sandy beaches and rocky shores, beneath the lapping of breaking waves, coasts around the world are (were) carpeted with green underwater meadows of seagrasses. Contrary to what you may be thinking, seagrasses are not a form of seaweed or even vaguely related, though they do often co-occur. Seagrasses are in fact angiosperms , flowering plants whose ancestors adapted to life in salt water back when dinosaurs roamed on land. Is anybody else picturing an plesiosaur gliding over a bed of seagrass? The ancestors of seagrasses took many biochemical and physical shifts in order to adapt to a wet and salty lifestyle. However, amazingly, an important feature that seagrasses have retained despite millions of years of evolution under the sea is their ability to flower. Turtlegrass flowering shoot ©Dawn Witherington

This post was originally published under the title "Grass Roots Biology" in the December 2015 issue of  The Biologist , the Royal Society of Biology's magazine. If you're a member of the RSB you can also view the article on their website here . The images are not those used by the RSB nor are they mine, the copyright belongs to their credited owners and most are from ARKive.org. Neptune grass ( Posidonia oceanica ) meadow in the Mediterranean © M. San Felix, from  l ivescience.com Grass Roots Biology Home to myriad species and acting as massive carbon sinks, seagrass meadows are key marine habitats – but they are disappearing fast, reports Xaali O'Reilly Berkeley The Biologist  62(6) p16-19 Seagrasses are a group of flowering plants adapted to live in salt water. They grow, flower and pollinate completely submerged in estuaries and along shallow coastal waters around the globe, both in temperate and tropical environments. Although they physi...