Skip to main content

The world’s largest organism 40x Blue Whale

Whale is not even close to being the largest organism by weight, which is estimated to equal about 40 whales. The organism name is Pando, whose name means “I spread out.” Pando, a quaking aspen, has roughly47,000 genetically identical clone trunks. 

             

Those all grow from one enormous root system, which is why scientists consider Pando a single organism. Pando is the clear winner of world’s largest organism by weight— an incredible 6 million kilograms. So how did Pando get to be so huge? Pando is not an unusual aspen from a genetic standpoint. Rather, Pando’s size boils down to three main factors: its age, its location, and aspens’ remarkable evolutionary adaptation of self-cloning. So first, Pando is incredibly expansive because it’s incredibly old. How old exactly? No one knows. Dendro chronologist estimates range from 80,000 to 1 million years. The problem is, there’s no simple way to gauge Pando’s age. Counting the rings of a single trunk will only account for up to 200 years or so, as Pando is in a constant cycle of growth, death, and renewal. On average, each individual tree lives 130 years, before falling and being replaced by new ones. Second: location. During the last ice age, which ended about 12,000 years ago, glaciers covered much of the North American climate friendly to aspens. So if there were other comparably sized clonal colonies, they may have perished then. 

Meanwhile, Pando’s corner of Utah remained glacier-free. The soil there is rich in nutrients that Pando continuously replenishes; as it drops leaves and trunks, the nutrients return to nourish new generations of clones. Which brings us to the third cause of Pando’s size: cloning. Aspens are capable of both sexual reproduction— which produces a new organism— and asexual reproduction— which creates a clone. They tend to reproduce sexually when conditions are unfavorable and the best strategy for survival is to move elsewhere. Trees aren’t particularly mobile, but their seeds are. Like the rest of us, sexual reproduction is how Pando came into the world in the first place all those tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. The wind or a pollinator carried pollen from the flower of one of its parents to the other, where a sperm cell fertilized an egg. That flower produced fruit, which split open, releasing hundreds of tiny, light seeds. The wind carried one to a wet spot of land in what is now Utah, where it took root and germinated into Pando’s first stem. A couple of years later, Pando grew mature enough to reproduce asexually. Asexual reproduction, or cloning, tends to happen when the environment is favorable to growth. Aspens have long roots that burrow through the soil. These can sprout shoots that grow up into new trunks. And while Pando grew and spread out, so did our ancestors. 

As Hunter-gatherers who made cave paintings, survived an ice age, found their way to North America, built civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia, fought wars, domesticated animals, fought wars, formed nations, built machines, and invented the internet, and always newer ways to fight wars. Pando has survived many millennia of changing climates and encroaching ice. But it may not survive us. New stems are growing to maturity much more slowly than they need to in order to replace the trunks that fall. Scientists have identified two main reasons for this. The first is that we’ve deprived Pando of fire. When a fire clears a patch of forest, Aspen roots survive, and send shoots bursting up out of the ground by the tens of thousands. 

And secondly, grazers like herds of cattle and mule deer— whose natural predators we’ve hunted to the point of local elimination— are eating Pando’s fresh growth. If we lose the world’s largest organism, we’ll lose a scientific treasure trove. Because Pando’s trunks are genetically identical, they can serve as a controlled setting for studies on everything from the tree microbiome to the influence of climate on tree growth rates. The good news is, we have a chance to save Pando, by reducing livestock grazing in the area and further protecting the vulnerable young saplings. And the time to act is today. Because as with so many other marvels of our natural world, once they’re gone it will be a very, very long time before they return. 

 Thank You

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The wealthiest person who ever lived - Musa Keita

If someone asked you who the richest people in history were, who would you name? Perhaps a billionaire banker or corporate mogul, like Bill Gates or John D. Rockefeller. What about African King Musa Keita I?Ruling the Mali Empire in the 14th century CE, Mansa Musa, or the King of Kings, amassed a fortune that possibly made him one of the wealthiest people who ever lived. But his vast wealth was only one piece of his rich legacy. When Mansa Musa came to power in 1312, much of Europe was racked by famine and civil wars. But many African kingdoms and the Islamic world were flourishing, and Mansa Musa played a great rolein bringing the fruits of this flourishing to his own realm. By strategically annexing the city of Timbuktu, and reestablishing power over the city of Gao, he gained control over important trade routes between the Mediterranean and the West African Coast, continuing a period of expansion, which dramatically increased Mali's size.  The territory of the Mali Empire was ri
Post a Comment
Read more

Why can’t governments print an unlimited amount of money?

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic rocked economies worldwide. Millions of people lost their jobs, and many businesses struggled to survive or shut down completely. Governments responded with some of the largest economic relief packages in history the United States alone spent $2.2 trillion on a first round of relief. So where did all this money come from? Most countries have a central bank  that manages the money supply and is independent from the government to prevent political interference. The government can implement many types of economic policy, like decreasing people's taxes and creating jobs through public  infrastructure projects, but it actually can’t just increase the money supply. The central bank determines how much money is in circulation at a time. So why can’t central banks authorize the printing of unlimited money to help an economy in crisis?  They could, but that’s a short-term solution that doesn’t necessarily boost economic growth in the long-term, and
Post a Comment
Read more

Are the illuminati real ?

The year was 1776. In Bavaria, new ideals of rationalism , religious freedom, and universal human rights competed with the Catholic church’s heavy influence over public affairs.  Across the Atlantic, a new nation staked its claim for independence on the basis of these ideas. But back in Bavaria, law professor Adam Weishaupt’s attempts to teach secular philosophy continued to be frustrated. Weishaupt decided to spread his ideas through a secret society that would shine a light on the shortcomings of the Church’s ideology. He called his secret society the Illuminati. Weishaupt modelled aspects of his secret society off a group called the Freemasons. Originally an elite stoneworkers’ guild in the late Middle Ages, the Freemasons had gone from passing down the craft of masonry to more generally promoting ideals of knowledge and reason. Over time, they had grown into a semi-secret, exclusive order that included many wealthy and influential individuals, with elaborate, secret initiation
Post a Comment
Read more