Lessons from the Earth’s Largest Living Organism
By Fred Paillet, OS Education Chair We regularly see in newspapers and magazines a general interest filler piece featuring the world’s largest single organism named Pando. It lives in the mountains of Utah and consists of a giant aspen grove connected by a network of underground roots: covering 106 acres, weighing an estimated 13 million pounds, and consisting of 40,000 individual trees. Pando is always photographed from the air above as the only practical way of giving a sense of its sheer size. Here I am reminded of the description of Hinduism as a faith that features thousands of different deities all of whom are the same god. In Pando, each individual tree has its own avatar, but they are all part of the same biological entity. The concept of entire groves of trees and shrubs that are separate yet the same – and otherwise genetically identical – is a theme that is repeatedly invoked in the science of forest ecology. There are many specific examples we can cite in the Ozarks. But the connection between stands of trees expanding by stems sprouting at a distance from their roots has been an important part of my own personal studies [...]