Only just realized this when watching a diving video.
But why isn’t the ocean full of massive plants? The surface of the earth is covered is giant trees working to fight against gravity, wind, and fire.
But in the ocean you have little things like coral beds and sponges and maybe a kelp forest.
Seeing as weight is massively reduced, and the closer you get to the surface means more light, and water and nutrients are probably plentiful… Why isn’t the plant life more massive? What is the limiting factor to things evolving to be bigger?
Only thing I can think of is CO2 perhaps?
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Wind dominates the morphological structure of trees. Weight is not the limit to tree height. Trees could grow many times their current maximum height on a planet with no wind. You could hang iron weights on most trees much greater than the weight of the tree. As long as the wind wasn’t blowing hard, the tree would stand.
Wind, the movement of something as light as air, is able to dominate the form land plants have evolved into.
Now realize that water has a thousand times the density of air.
There’s a reason all it takes to cause a local explosion of diversity in sea life is to dump something solid like a subway car into the sea. Water has so much momentum behind it that life struggles just to remain firmly fixed in one place while subject to waves and current.
EDIT: Also one other major structural factor: soil! Dry well compacted soils are stronger than moist loose soils. The sea bed is an ever-churning bed of loose water logged mud and sand. So not only are ocean plants subject to much greater lateral loads due to the 1000x density of water over air, but those ocean plants also must cling to the worst foundation imaginable.
Plants rely on photosynthesis. The deeper you go, the darker it is.
But in the ocean you have little things like coral beds and sponges and maybe a kelp forest.
Coral and sponges are animals, not plants.
The parts of the ocean shallow enough for them to get sunlight and rocky enough for them to hold on often are:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroalgae
(Not technically plants, but basically sea plants.)
Plankton can be plants or animals, there are a lot of those
Yes but they are tiny.
I’m talking about blue whale type equivalent to aquatic plants. The biggest mammal on the planet lives in the ocean why not the biggest plant or fungus?
The Sargasso Sea has lots of seaweed, but I hear your point, it’s not the base state of the ocean to be filled with plants
They’d tip over, or be uprooted by the high wave swells.
