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Zostera marina
Also called Eelgrass, Eel-grass, Narrow Leaved Eelgrass, Common Eel Grass, Grasswrack, Common Eelgrass, Sea Grass
Common eelgrass is a rhizomatous seagrass that grows fully submerged in cool, calm coastal seawater across the northern Atlantic and Pacific. It is not a garden plant, and its key requirement is saline water with sandy or muddy seabed to anchor in.
Zostera marina is a flowering vascular plant species as one of many kinds of seagrass, with this species known primarily by the English name of common eelgrass or eelgrass, with seawrack much less used, and refers to the plant after breaking loose from the submerged wetland soil, and drifting free with ocean current and waves to a coast seashore. It is a saline soft-sediment submerged plant native to marine environments on the coastlines of northern latitudes from subtropical to subpolar regions of North America and Eurasia.
This species is the most wide-ranging marine flowering plant in the Northern Hemisphere and the most widespread species in the temperate northern hemisphere of Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It lives in cooler ocean waters in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, and in the warmer southern parts of its range it dies off during warmer seasons. It grows in the Arctic region and endures several months of ice cover per year. It is the only seagrass known from Iceland. It can be found in bays, lagoons, estuaries, on beaches, and in other coastal habitat. The several ecotypes each have specific habitat requirements. It occurs in calmer waters in the sublittoral zone, where it is rarely exposed to air. It anchors via rhizomes in sandy or muddy substrates and its leaves catch particulate debris in the water which then collects around the bases of the plants, building up the top layer of the seabed.
Species code: za · Species code: Zs · Species code: Zp · Zostera capricorni · Species code: Zl · Dwarf Eelgrass · Zostera mucronata · Species code: Zc · Species code: Zg · Zostera novazelandica · Species code: Zo · Species code: Zt
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Zostera marina by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
