What is the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms?
"traditional owners groups agreed to cease the hunting of dugongs in the area in 2011 due to their declining numbers, partially accelerated by seagrass damage from Cyclone Yasi. Great Barrier Reef The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over over an area of approximately . The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, Australia. The Great Barrier Reef can be seen from outer space and is the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms. This reef structure is composed"
"over . The largest organism in the world, according to mass, is the aspen tree whose colonies of clones can grow up to five miles long. The largest such colony is Pando, in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah. Another form of flowering plant that rivals Pando as the largest organism on earth in breadth, if not mass, is the giant marine plant, ""Posidonia oceanica"", discovered in the Mediterranean near the Balearic Islands, Spain. Its length is about . It may also be the oldest living organism in the world, with an estimated age of 100,000 years. Green algae are"
"Syringammina fragilissima Syringammina fragilissima is a xenophyophore found off the coast of Scotland, near Rockall. It is the largest single-cell organism known, at up to across. It was the first xenophyophore to be described, after being discovered in 1882 by the oceanographer John Murray. The cell grows into hundreds of branched and interconnecting tubes, which secrete an organic cement to collect particles of sediment and sand, forming a crusty structure called the ""test"". As the test grows, the cell withdraws from parts of it, which are then colonised by other organisms, such as nematodes. The cell is multinucleate (it has"
"been shown to be a single clone connected by the root system. It is sometimes considered the world's largest organism by mass, covering , and also as amongst the world's oldest living organisms, at an estimated 80,000 years old. It is possible that other unknown clonal colonies of trees rival or exceed its size and/ or age. Another possible candidate for oldest organism on earth is an underwater meadow of the marine plant ""Posidonia oceanica"" in the Mediterranean Sea, which could be up to 100,000 years of age. When woody plants form clonal colonies, they often remain connected through the"
"""outsized"" and are not in the normal size range for the respective group. If considered singular entities, the largest organisms are clonal colonies which can spread over large areas. Pando, a clonal colony of the quaking aspen tree, is widely considered to be the largest such organism by mass. Even if such colonies are excluded, trees retain their dominance of this listing, with the giant sequoia being the most massive tree. In 2006 a huge clonal colony of ""Posidonia oceanica"" was discovered south of the island of Ibiza. At across, and estimated at around 100,000 years old, it may be"
"Coral reefs are the largest structures created by living organisms, and contain abundant and highly complex microbial communities. A coral ""head"" is a colony of genetically identical polyps, which secrete an exoskeleton near the base. Depending on the species, the exoskeleton may be hard, based on calcium carbonate, or soft and proteinaceous. Over many generations, the colony creates a large skeleton that is characteristic of the species. Diverse forms of life take up residence in a coral colony, including photosynthetic algae such as ""Symbiodinium"", as well as a wide range of bacteria including nitrogen fixers, and chitin decomposers, all of"
"multiple nuclei). It is not known how the organism feeds or reproduces. However, it has been shown to have high concentrations of lipids within its cytosol, which suggests that it may feed on bacteria from the sediment that makes up the ""sand tubes."" Syringammina fragilissima Syringammina fragilissima is a xenophyophore found off the coast of Scotland, near Rockall. It is the largest single-cell organism known, at up to across. It was the first xenophyophore to be described, after being discovered in 1882 by the oceanographer John Murray. The cell grows into hundreds of branched and interconnecting tubes, which secrete an"
"area, and rivals the aspen grove ""Pando"" as the known organism with the highest living biomass. It is not known, however, whether it is a single organism with all parts of the mycelium connected. In ""Armillaria ostoyae"", each individual mushroom (the fruiting body, similar to a flower on a plant) has only a stipe, and a pileus up to across. There are many other fungi which produce a larger individual size mushroom. The largest known fruiting body of a fungus is a specimen of ""Phellinus ellipsoideus"" (formerly ""Fomitiporia ellipsoidea"") found on Hainan Island. The fruiting body masses up to ."
"Stentor (ciliate) Stentor, sometimes called trumpet animalcules, are a genus of filter-feeding, heterotrophic ciliates, representative of the heterotrichs. They are usually horn-shaped, and reach lengths of two millimeters; as such, they are among the biggest known extant unicellular organisms. They reproduce asexually through binary fission. The body, or cortex, is generally horn-shaped, hence the association with the Greek herald and the former name ""trumpet animalcule"", with a ring of prominent cilia around the anterior ""bell"" that sweep in food and aid in swimming. Some reach several millimeters in length, making them among the largest single celled organisms. ""Stentor"" can come"
"crustaceans called copepods may form the largest animal biomass on earth. A 2009 paper in ""Science"" estimates, for the first time, the total world fish biomass as somewhere between 0.8 and 2.0 billion tonnes. It has been estimated that about 1% of the global biomass is due to phytoplankton, and 25% is due to fungi. Net primary production is the rate at which new biomass is generated, mainly due to photosynthesis. Global primary production can be estimated from satellite observations. Satellites scan the normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) over terrestrial habitats, and scan sea-surface chlorophyll levels over oceans. This results"
"surrounds it. Valonia ventricosa Valonia ventricosa, also known as ""bubble algae"" and ""sailor's eyeballs,"" is a species of algae found in oceans throughout the world in tropical and subtropical regions. It is one of the largest single-celled organisms. Ventricaria ventricosa has a coenocytic structure with multiple nuclei and chloroplasts. This organism possesses a large central vacuole which is multilobular in structure (lobules radiating from a central spheroid region). The entire cell contains several cytoplasmic domains with each domain having a nucleus and a few chloroplasts. Cytoplasmic domains are interconnected by cytoplasmic ""bridges"" that are supported by microtubules. The peripheral cytoplasm"
"one of the largest and oldest clonal colonies on Earth. Among animals, the largest species are all marine mammals, specifically whales. The blue whale is believed to be the largest animal to have ever lived. The largest land animal classification is also dominated by mammals, with the African bush elephant being the most massive of these. The largest single-stem tree by wood volume and mass is the giant sequoia (""Sequoiadendron giganteum""), native to Sierra Nevada and California; it typically grows to a height of and in diameter. Multiple-stem trees such as banyan can be enormous. Thimmamma Marrimanu in India spreads"
"Lindsey Creek tree The Lindsey Creek French Tree is the largest single-stem organism (tree) thus far known to have existed historically. It was a coast redwood (also known as California redwood), a member of the species ""Sequoia sempervirens"". It grew in Fieldbrook, California, along the Lindsey Creek, which feeds into the Mad River. When it was uprooted and felled by a storm in 1905, its mass was at least 3,630 short tons, 3.3 million kilograms, or 7.26 million pounds; and its trunk volume was at least 2,550 cubic meters (90,000 cubic feet). In terms of volume, this would make it"
"March 2014 in a soil sample collected from a riverbank in Siberia. Prior to this discovery, the largest virus was the peculiar virus genus ""Pandoravirus"", which have a size of approximately 1 micrometer and whose genome contains 1,900,000 to 2,500,000 base pairs of DNA. Both these viruses infect amoebas specifically. Largest organisms The largest organisms now found on Earth can be determined according to various aspects of an organism's size, such as: mass, volume, area, length, height, or even genome size. Some organisms group together to form a superorganism (such as ants or bees), but such are not classed as"
"described Pando as a single organism based on its morphological characteristics alone; molecular techniques and methods developed since that time have largely substantiated those conclusions. Building on Barnes's earlier work, Michael Grant of the University of Colorado at Boulder re-examined the clone, named it ""Pando"", and claimed it to be the world's most massive organism in 1992. In 2006 the United States Postal Service published a stamp in commemoration of the aspen, calling it one of the forty ""Wonders of America."" The clonal colony encompasses , weighs nearly , and has over 40,000 stems (trunks), which die individually and are"
"the largest man-made structure lengthwise, second only to the Great Wall of China and the largest earthwork in the world. With more recent work by Patrick Darling, it has been established as the largest man-made structure in the world, larger than Sungbo’s Eredo. It enclosed 6,500 km of community lands. Its length was over 16,000 km of earth boundaries. It was estimated that earliest construction began in 800 and continued into the mid-15th century. The walls are built of a ditch and dike structure; the ditch dug to form an inner moat with the excavated earth used to form the"
"to be tall, but its true height is not known. For thousands of years, the Great Pyramid in Egypt was the tallest ""structure"" in the world, but the Great Pyramid is not considered a building since it is not habitable. The earliest structures now known to be the tallest in the world were the Egyptian pyramids, with the Great Pyramid of Giza, at an original height of , being the tallest man-made structure in the world for over 3,800 years, until the construction of Lincoln Cathedral in 1300. From then until the completion of the Washington Monument (capped in 1884)"
"photosynthetic unicellular and multicellular protists that are related to land plants. The thallus of the unicellular mermaid's wineglass, ""Acetabularia"", can grow to several inches (perhaps 0.1 to 0.2 m) in length. The fronds of the similarly unicellular, and invasive ""Caulerpa taxifolia"" can grow up to a foot (0.3 m) long. A member of the order Cetacea, the blue whale (""Balaenoptera musculus""), is thought to be the largest animal ever to have lived. The maximum recorded weight was 190 metric tonnes for a specimen measuring , whereas longer ones, up to , have been recorded but not weighed. The African bush"
"sempervirens), currently the world's tallest tree, is no less than 115.72 m (379.7 feet) tall. Lindsey Creek tree The Lindsey Creek French Tree is the largest single-stem organism (tree) thus far known to have existed historically. It was a coast redwood (also known as California redwood), a member of the species ""Sequoia sempervirens"". It grew in Fieldbrook, California, along the Lindsey Creek, which feeds into the Mad River. When it was uprooted and felled by a storm in 1905, its mass was at least 3,630 short tons, 3.3 million kilograms, or 7.26 million pounds; and its trunk volume was at"
"organisms can be made up of a great many fruit bodies connected by networks of mycelia (including the ""humongous fungus"", a single specimen of ""Armillaria solidipes"") can cover a very large area. The largest identified fungal fruit body in the world is a specimen of ""Phellinus ellipsoideus"" (formerly ""Fomitiporia ellipsoidea""). The species was discovered in 2008 by Bao-Kai Cui and Yu-Cheng Dai in Fujian Province, China. In 2011, the two of them published details of extremely large fruit body of the species that they had found on Hainan Island. The specimen, which was 20 years old, was estimated to weigh"
"and branching tubes in axial bundles; this seems to be a fungus. Alternative views have suggested that ""Prototaxites"" was a vascular plant superficially like yew trees (hence the generic name), a kelp-like alga, or enrolled liverwort mats with associated cyanobacteria and fungal tubular elements. This organism would have been the tallest living thing in its day by far; the plant ""Cooksonia"" (pictured in navigational box below) only reached 1 m, and itself towered over the ""moss forests""; invertebrates were the only other land-dwelling multi-cellular life. ""Prototaxites"" became extinct as shrubs and vascular trees rose to prominence. The organism could have"
"""Armillaria ostoyae"". A mushroom of this type in the Malheur National Forest in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, U.S. was found to be the largest fungal colony in the world, spanning of area. This organism is estimated to be 2,400 years old. The fungus was written about in the April 2003 issue of the ""Canadian Journal of Forest Research"". While an accurate estimate has not been made, the total weight of the colony may be as much as 605 tons. If this colony is considered a single organism, then it is the largest known organism in the world by"
"One of the smallest recent cysts is the cyst of ""Pentapharsodinium dalei"", which can be as small as 19 µm in length. One of the largest recent cysts is the cyst of ""Protoperidinium latissimum"", which can be as large as 100 µm in length. The walls of organic-walled dinocysts are composed of the resistant biopolymer called dinosporin. This organic compound has similarities to sporopollenin, but is unique to dinoflagellates. In addition to organic-walled cysts, there are also calcareous dinoflagellate cysts and siliceous dinoflagellate cysts. In pure morphological terms, a dinocyst can be described as the body formed by the cyst"
"of millions of viruses and tens of millions of bacteria are deposited daily on every square meter around the planet. Microscopic organisms live in every part of the biosphere. The mass of prokaryote microorganisms — which includes bacteria and archaea, but not the nucleated eukaryote microorganisms — may be as much as 0.8 trillion tons of carbon (of the total biosphere mass, estimated at between 1 and 4 trillion tons). Barophilic marine microbes have been found at more than a depth of in the Mariana Trench, the deepest spot in the Earth's oceans. In fact, single-celled life forms have been"
"mass alone, since in shell-bearing species the vast majority of the living tissue is restricted to the body chamber, which occupies only a fraction of the internal shell volume (Vermeij, 2016). They might also be the largest—or at least longest—shell-bearing animals that have ever lived (Vermeij, 2016). The maximum sizes of certain cephalopod species, most notably the giant squid and giant Pacific octopus, have often been misreported and exaggerated. The literature on cephalopod size has been further muddied by the frequent misattribution of various squid specimens to the giant squid genus ""Architeuthis"", often based solely on their large size. In"
"been formed by biotic activity according to some NASA scientists. On 5 March 2011, Richard B. Hoover, a scientist with the Marshall Space Flight Center, speculated on the finding of alleged microfossils similar to cyanobacteria in CI1 carbonaceous meteorites in the fringe ""Journal of Cosmology"", a story widely reported on by mainstream media. However, NASA formally distanced itself from Hoover's claim. According to American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: ""At the moment, life on Earth is the only known life in the universe, but there are compelling arguments to suggest we are not alone."" On 17 March 2013, researchers reported that"
"al."", 2012:683). Cephalopods were at one time the largest of all organisms on Earth (Smith ""et al."", 2016), and numerous species of comparable size to the largest present day squids are known from the fossil record, including enormous examples of ammonoids, belemnoids, nautiloids, orthoceratoids, teuthids, and vampyromorphids. In terms of mass, the largest of all known cephalopods were likely the giant shelled ammonoids and endocerid nautiloids (Teichert & Kummel, 1960:6), though perhaps still second to the largest living cephalopods when considering tissue mass alone (Vermeij, 2016). Size, and particularly maximum size, has been one of the most interesting aspects of"
"skeletal framework. Coral reefs are an excellent example of this kind. Corals and calcareous algae grow on top of one another and form a three-dimensional framework that is modified in various ways by other organisms and inorganic processes. By contrast, mounds lack a macroscopic skeletal framework (""see"" stromatolite). Mounds are built by microorganisms or by organisms that don't grow a skeletal framework. A microbial mound might be built exclusively or primarily by cyanobacteria. Excellent examples of biostromes formed by cyanobacteria occur in the Great Salt Lake in Utah, and in Shark Bay on the coast of Western Australia. Cyanobacteria do"
"squids, with maximum weight estimated at for females, while arctic lion's mane jellyfish mat reach comparable sizes. The longest animal on record is also thought to be a soft-bodied organism, a long thread-like bootlace worm, ""Lineus longissimus"" found on a Scottish beach 1864. Siphonophores may grow to considerable sizes too, though they are colonial organisms, and each single animal is small. Most soft-bodied organisms are as small or smaller, even microscopic. The various organisms grouped as mesozoans and the curious Placozoa are typically composed of just a few hundred cells. The lack of hard parts in Soft-bodied organisms makes them"
"concluding around 2560 BC. Initially at , the Great Pyramid was the tallest man-made structure in the world for more than 3,800 years. Originally, the Great Pyramid was covered by limestone casing stones that formed a smooth outer surface; what is seen today is the underlying core structure. Some of the casing stones that once covered the structure can still be seen around the base. There have been varying scientific and alternative theories about the Great Pyramid's construction techniques. Most accepted construction hypotheses are based on the idea that it was built by moving huge stones from a quarry and"
"Ecosystem of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG) is the largest contiguous ecosystem on earth. In oceanography, a subtropical gyre is a ring-like system of ocean currents rotating clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Southern Hemisphere caused by the Coriolis Effect. They generally form in large open ocean areas that lie between land masses. The NPSG is the largest of the gyres as well as the largest ecosystem on our planet. Like other subtropical gyres, it has a high-pressure zone in its center. Circulation around the center is clockwise around this high-pressure"
"Nanobe A nanobe is a tiny filamental structure first found in some rocks and sediments. Some scientists hypothesize that nanobes are the smallest form of life, 1/10 the size of the smallest known bacteria. No conclusive evidence exists that these structures are, or are not, living organisms, so their classification is controversial. The 1996 discovery of nanobes was published in 1998 by Philippa Uwins ""et al."", from the University of Queensland, Australia. They were found growing from rock samples (both full-diameter and sidewall cores) of Jurassic and Triassic sandstones, originally retrieved from an unspecified number of oil exploration wells off"
"Valonia ventricosa Valonia ventricosa, also known as ""bubble algae"" and ""sailor's eyeballs,"" is a species of algae found in oceans throughout the world in tropical and subtropical regions. It is one of the largest single-celled organisms. Ventricaria ventricosa has a coenocytic structure with multiple nuclei and chloroplasts. This organism possesses a large central vacuole which is multilobular in structure (lobules radiating from a central spheroid region). The entire cell contains several cytoplasmic domains with each domain having a nucleus and a few chloroplasts. Cytoplasmic domains are interconnected by cytoplasmic ""bridges"" that are supported by microtubules. The peripheral cytoplasm (whose membrane"