The Pando spans 106 acres on a rolling hillside where it has overlooked the picturesque Fish Lake for thousands of years, possibly tens of thousands. But down among the trees it’s evident this iconic stretch of aspen trees, the most massive known organism on the planet, is in peril.
If you have suffered from spinal cord injury differs according viagra sans prescription to the extent or gravity of the injury. For example, should a woman pay her “fair” share equally if her disposable income cialis generic cheap is less than 3 pounds. Few people know that there levitra brand are two kinds of bodies – cavernous and spongy. Most of these products people levitra tabs downtownsault.org can purchase on attractive money off.
Staring up at the golden leaves and white branches, you’ll miss it. The problem is closer to the ground. Where there should be new shoots growing into young saplings and adolescent trees, there’s nothing to speak of – just tall, full grown trees.
It’s Pando’s inability to regenerate and grow new aspens as the old trees die off that scientists believe threatens its survival.
“Without a next generation to back them up, I think we’re clearly on the road to collapse,” says Paul Rogers, a Utah State Universityprofessor who has studied Pando extensively. “I’d say within 10 years or 20 years at most, there will be very little left of this clone.”
Pando is the most massive known living organism on the planet, although there is some dispute over if it is the largest. A below-ground mushroom, dubbed the “humongous fungus,” was discovered in Oregon and, according to research published in 2003, spans nearly 2,400 acres.”
In terms of pure weight, however, Pando tops them all, weighing more than 13 million pounds – about five times more than the largest giant sequoia tree and as much as about 45 fully grown blue whales.
All of it is intricately bound together by genetics, a shared system of roots. Energy or water gathered by one tree is shared with other trees in the network. The leaves that capture the sunlight all share the same pattern of serrations, the buds are all the same shape and they “burst” at the same time. The branches reach upward at the same angle. Wipe off the ubiquitous white coating on the aspen trunks, and the trees are the same color.
It’s by mapping these techniques that University of Michigan botanist Burton Barnes was able to trace the boundaries of the clone with remarkable accuracy four decades ago and he was the first, in a paper published in 1976, to suggest the clone may be a single organism.
His mapping of the clone was later verified – and found to be remarkably precise – by Utah State University scientist Karen Mock using DNA testing.
Pando began as a single seed, the size of a dandelion seed, perhaps 14,000 years ago, possibly as much as 60,000 years or more, although estimates are little more than guesswork. Because the clone is constantly regenerating, replacing old trees with new ones, there is no way to date the stand. “Pando” translates into “I spread,” and in the ensuing centuries he (Pando is genetically male) did just that, as his root system crept further and further, sending up roots, growing tens, then hundreds, then thousands of new aspen trees.
Scientists don’t know how extensively the trees in the clone are connected. Once the saplings reach a certain age, they can separate and form their own root system, Mock explained, although because of the shared genetics, trees that are separated still have similar characteristics, with buds that burst and leaves that turn at the same time.
Utah made Pando its official state tree in 2014, and increasingly it has become a draw for visitors, especially in the fall when the leaves change. It’s almost revered in some quarters by those who see it as a symbol for the larger interconnectedness of life.
But the balance that epitomizes Pando has been disrupted, Rogers says.
The mule deer and, to a lesser extent, elk that roamed among Pando for millennia bear part of the blame, but really it’s humans who upset the equilibrium by wiping out natural predators.
“There’s this strange, magical feeling at being in something that has been around for so long, and now it’s all coming apart on our watch,” Rogers says. “As soon as we started meddling, things started coming off-center.”
Without bears and mountain lion to control the deer population and to keep them on the move, the ungulates camp out among the aspen and devour the young shoots, stripping the leaves and chewing the stems to the ground.
“It’s like an ice cream stand out there,” says Nicholas Mustoe, the U.S. Forest Service forester for the area that includes Pando. “It’s really palatable food for them.”
Hunting is off limits because a campground and cabins scattered amid Pando make it too dangerous.
The older trees, perhaps as many as 70 percent of the 47,000 trunks, are dead or rapidly nearing the end of their lives, Rogers says, with no new generation growing to replace them.
The decline is even visible from the air. Rogers’ most recent work takes a series of aerial photos of Pando, dating back to 1939, many from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and overlays them atop one another. The time-lapse series, he says, makes it clear that Pando is aging and thinning.
“It’s striking looking at that series,” Rogers says. “Even though some are black and white and some are in color, with a trained eye – or a not-so-trained eye – you can see the forest is starting to come unraveled.”
The thinning of Pando is worrisome when it comes to keeping the clone healthy and regenerating, researcher Mock said via email.
“Roots are like the battery if the leaves are solar panels … so if the overstory thins out, there is less photosynthesis and the roots deteriorate,” she said.
The deterioration of Pando also could serve as a larger warning, as well, Mock said.
“It would be sad to lose such a big clone, but of course the really scary thing is what it means for the species in the West,” she said. “It is a very large canary in the coal mine, I think.”
There is hope for the old clone, however. For the past several years, Rogers and his colleagues have had a 16-acre portion of Pando fenced off to keep out the deer. Walking through the grove on a recent visit, the difference between the new growth on one side of the fence versus the other was astonishing.
Outside the fence, there were barely any trees shorter than 10 feet tall. But just a few feet away, inside the fenced area, safe from the grazing deer, there were hundreds of saplings, anywhere from a few inches to several feet high.
“I don’t know how much longer it will live for,” says Matthew LaPlante, author of the upcoming book “Superlative,” about the planet’s most extreme organisms, which includes a chapter on Pando. “But we gave it more life. And we didn’t just take it off life support. Maybe we gave it a heart transplant.”
Now researchers are trying to replicate the experiment with a larger area, about 40 acres, near the original fence, meaning a fence surrounds nearly half of the aspen clone now.
Mustoe says the Forest Service is monitoring the results, for now, but the question of how to help Pando survive is not as simple as it may seem and, perhaps, it is capable of saving itself.
Aspen trees will send chemical signals when to send up more shoots, so if Pando finds itself in jeopardy, it may turn up the chemistry and produce more shoots. Aspens are also able to produce a chemical that make the shoots taste bad to deer, Mustoe says, a defense against overgrazing.
“I think it’s a little mischaracterized, the state (Pando) is in,” Mustoe says. With new sprouts in the fenced areas, the clone will survive, even if the portions of it may struggle. “I completely agree it’s not in ideal health. We’d prefer to see smaller, younger trees, but that’s more of a long-term threat to those areas and that part of the clone than a short-term one.”
Recently, the cash-strapped Forest Service, working with the Fishlake Discovery Association, a nonprofit partner, has had to resort to crowdsourcing funding for interpretive sites in the aspen grove. It launched a GoFundMe page to try to raise $85,000 to erect more fencing, to put up educational signs, and to stage nature walks through the clone.
The state is also trying to draw attention to the clone, highlighting it as a destination for fall leaf-peepers.
It is an invitation to people – many of whom drive the highway that runs through the middle of the forest or pass beneath the boughs of the planet’s most gigantic living thing without ever knowing it – to stop and appreciate its magnificence while they still can.
“Pando has been there a very, very long time,” says Michael Grant, the retired University of Colorado researcher who calculated the clone’s weight and gave it its name. “I hope it can persist and weather these assaults on it, but I don’t know that it will.”