Seagrasses are not seaweed. They are flowering plants, just like grasses that grow on land, but they grow on the sea beds in shallow coastal waters, and form an important food source and habitat for many sea creatures. Like land plants they need a good supply of nitrogen to grow well, and plants can usually get this from nitrogen containing compounds in the soil.
Some plants, e.g. legumes, also obtain nitrogen containing compounds from bacteria that live in their roots, and these plants can grow in soils that are otherwise poor in nitrogen. The bacteria take nitrogen gas from the air or dissolved in soil or water and convert it to a form the plants can use. In return the plant supplies sugars and other nutrients to the bacteria. Scientists studying seagrasses have noted they grow well in habitats with poor supplies of nitrogen, such as the Mediterranean Sea.
A group of German and Swiss researchers have studied the roots of a seagrass named Posidonia oceanica looking for evidence of a symbiotic supply of nitrogen. Wiebke Mohr from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Germany, who led the study explained: “It was assumed that the so-called fixed-nitrogen for the seagrasses comes from bacteria that live around their roots in the seafloor. We now show that the relationship is much closer: The bacteria live inside the roots of the seagrass. This is the first time that such an intimate symbiosis has been shown in seagrasses. It was previously only known from land plants, especially agriculturally important species such as legumes, wheat and sugar cane”. (emphasis in original)
The research team suggest that when land plants moved into the sea “100 million years ago” they adopted bacteria already living among seaweeds. Mohr commented: “They virtually copied the system that was highly successful on land and then, in order to survive in the nutrient-poor seawater, acquired a marine symbiont”.
According to Nature News and Views, “The evolution of this cooperative arrangement has resulted in tight integration of the genetic systems and metabolisms of the respective partners”.
References and Link: ScienceDaily 3 November 2021, Nature News and Views 3 November 2021, and Nature 3 November 2021 doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-04063-4.
Editorial Comment: It is amazing how evolutionists ascribe purposeful behaviour to mindless plants without explaining what made perfectly functioning land plants move into the sea, especially when sea beds are so poor in nitrogen? How did they adopt microbes from the sea, and what brought about the “tight integration of the genetic systems and metabolisms of the respective partners”?
Just because seagrasses have some structures also seen in land plants does not prove they are derived from land plants. This story is just as much evolutionary wishful thinking as the evolutionists’ belief that land plants evolved from seaweed.
All our studies of seagrasses show no evidence that seagrasses have ever been anything else but seagrasses, living in the sea, along with their symbiotic partners. They certainly fit the concept that they were created as fully functioning living things, working together ready to sustain the sea creatures God created to live amongst them.
Creation Research News 17 November 2021
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