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RE: 8000 year old trees - 4/21/2008 8:17:33 PM
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Sartrian
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If you think this is impressive, you might want to go look up Pando. It's an entire forest-- that's made up of one Quaking Aspen that, over the course of 80,000 years, has sprouted 47,000 stems-- trunks-- over the length of 107 acres.
In comparison, anthropologists generally agree that the Homo sapiens migration out of Africa began only 40,000 years ago, and colonization of the Americas, only 10,000 years ago.
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RE: 8000 year old trees - 4/21/2008 9:18:32 PM
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DanJames
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It's these kind of plants that make it difficult to define a distinct organism. There are a lot of plants that reproduce by spreading their root systems and creating little clones of themselves that never separate from the parent plant. Is it technically a different tree? Is it the same tree? What kind of definition do we use? You do present a good point, Sartrian.
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RE: 8000 year old trees - 4/21/2008 9:24:12 PM
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Sartrian
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Well, each trunk has the same genetic markers and they share the same root system. It's the same tree. Not clones per se, but one tree that managed to create 47,000 outcroppings of itself through its root system. I guess it's debatable whether you would consider each trunk an individual, but technically, it's an extention of Pando as a whole.
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RE: 8000 year old trees - 4/21/2008 9:32:41 PM
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DanJames
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Sartrian
Well, each trunk has the same genetic markers and they share the same root system. It's the same tree. Not clones per se, but one tree that managed to create 47,000 outcroppings of itself through its root system. I guess it's debatable whether you would consider each trunk an individual, but technically, it's an extention of Pando as a whole.
No doubt. Plants are amazing. It could be considered asexual reproduction. Some plants bud and become disconnected from the parent plant, others stay connected as an extension of the parent plant. It's kinda like bacterial colonies which remain connected such as Volvox that buds a new bacterium which remains connected to the parent through a glycoprotein, creating a large ball of organisms that move like one organism.
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