/jp/ - Otaku Culture

King's lomatia is a shrub that that narrowly avoided extinction with a single surviving individual. Unfortunately, the individual in question was a sterile triploid only able to clone itself vegetatively. Fortunately, it was very good at doing just that, and so every king's lomatia plant is genetically identical to a single ancestral plant that lived at least 43,600 years ago.

>>3865417
If you liked those, I recommend both paying a few visits to /an/ (since the board is so slow, you can do that every other week and not lose many threads) since they discuss that sort of thing when they're not drowning in cat and dog threads, and visiting Bogleech, a site written by someone far more knowledgeable and well-versed than me on bizarre animals.

Picture is king's lomatia, a rather peculiar plant, as Wikipedia tells:

>King's Lomatia is unusual because all of the remaining plants are genetically identical. Because it has three sets of chromosomes (a triploid) and is therefore sterile, reproduction occurs only vegetatively: when a branch falls, that branch grows new roots, establishing a new plant that is genetically identical to its parent.

>Although all the plants are technically separate in that each has its own root system, they are collectively considered to be one of the oldest living plant clones. Each plant's life span is approximately 300 years, but the plant has been cloning itself for at least 43,600 years (possibly up to 135,000 years). This estimate is based on the radiocarbon dating of fossilised leaf fragments that were found 8.5 km away. The fossilised fragments are identical to the contemporary plant in cell structure and shape, which indicates that both plants are triploid and therefore clones due to the extreme rarity of the occurrence of triploidy.