Acknowledgements

We thank Xiaokai Fan (Ocean University of China, China) for collecting distribution data of Thalassia hemprichii and Jinxin Zhou (University of Tokyo, Japan) for figure illustration. We further thank Dr Aussanee Meekaew (Shizuoka University, Japan) for kindly providing us with the nice pictures of Thalassia hemprichii in Figure 2. This study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (31971395, 41761144057), Thailand Research Fund (RDG6130002), the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) through the projects UID/Multi/04326/2019 and PTDC/BIA-CBI/6515/2020 and the transitional norm -DL57/2016/CP1361/CT0035 to JA. SM acknowledges support from the European commission (program H2020-MSCA-IF-2019; grant award: 882221). ZZ and MY acknowledge the financial support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (18K05780). JMK acknowledges support from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Postdoctoral Fellowships for Foreign Researchers program and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University.