One Thing

The largest single living organism in the world is 106 acres big.  Named Pando which is Latin for “I spread”, it is also called the Trembling Giant.  It weighs approximately 6 million kilograms which also makes it the heaviest known organism  It is among the oldest known living organisms as well.

Pando is a clonal colony of a single male quaking aspen tree.  The massive underground root system which keeps on sending up new saplings that turn into trees is an estimated 80,000 years old. There are approximately 40,000 trunks which arise and die and are replaced by new trunks.  The trunks are all genetically identical proving they are all a part of one organism. Quakng aspens reproduce by sending out suckers that send up erect stems that look like individual trees although they are all form one single tree.

This amazing tree clone is found in south-central Utah. It was told to the world by researcher Burton Barnes in 1968. You can get a visual overview from a short video  on youtube to get a sense of the size of it.

Pando is in trouble because both the young saplings and the root system are under attack and there is an absence of juvenile and young stems now.  These are vital for the ongoing survival of the clone.  Scientists are trying to find solutions to save Pando.  They are employing students as “citizen scientists” to monitor and study the clone. You can see a video of Pando and some of these students here.   Parts of it are now fenced off to keep deer and elk from grazing the young shoots.

I learned about Pando when a friend lent me a CD of a singer songwriter named Roy Hickling.  He wrote a song about Pando called One Thing. Here are the lyrics:

A grove of Quaking Aspen trees

Alive for eighty centuries

Fifty thousand side by side

From one root they’ve lived and died

-      One thing

A dab of colour trembling leaves

Is it all or one you perceive?

Never know how high they’ll climb

Each one in their own time

-      One thing

-       

From borrowed earth we arise

With borrowed time, live our lives

The Aspen trees, the globe and us

All connected by the dust

-      One thing

A “Need to Know”  video on youtube concludes that what we can learn from Pando is that “life is strong when the individual is in community.”  This amazing aspen clone may have witnessed the world during most of human development.  It has survived many environmental stresses without any notice from most of the world.  But now it is beloved by those who visit it, live nearby and just hear about it.  And now some of those people who find it so inspiring, such an example of community and cooperation are working together to help it continue.  And they are building community with each other and with all the things that live where Pando lives. This is a very old story and also a new one.