Strange Forest 'Superorganism' Is Keeping a New Zealand Vampire Tree Alive (livescience.com) 77
The Grim Reefer shares a report from Live Science: Once a mighty kauri tree -- a species of conifer that can grow up to 165 feet (50 meters) tall -- the low, leafless stump looks like it should be long dead. But, as a new study published today in the journal iScience reminds us, looks are only surface-deep. Below the soil, the study authors wrote, the stump is part of a forest "superorganism" -- a network of intertwined roots sharing resources across a community that could include dozens or hundreds of trees. By grafting its roots onto its neighbors' roots, the kauri stump feeds at night on water and nutrients that other trees have collected during the day, staying alive thanks to their hard work.
Using several sensors to measure the movement of water and sap (which contains important nutrients) through the three trees, the team saw a curious pattern: the stump and its neighbors seemed to be drinking up water at exact opposite times. During the day, when the vibrant neighbor trees were busy transporting water up their roots and into their leaves, the stump sat dormant. At night, when the neighbors settled down, the stump circulated water through what was left of its body. The trees, it seemed, were taking turns -- serving as separate pumps in a single hydraulic network. So, why add a near-dead tree to your underground nutrient highway? While the stump no longer has any leaves, researchers wrote, it's possible that its roots still have value as a bridge to other vibrant, photosynthesizing trees elsewhere in the forest. It's also possible that the stump joined roots with its neighbors a long time ago, before it was, well, a stump. Since nutrients still flow through the stump's roots and into the rest of the network, the neighboring trees may never have noticed its loss of greenery.
Using several sensors to measure the movement of water and sap (which contains important nutrients) through the three trees, the team saw a curious pattern: the stump and its neighbors seemed to be drinking up water at exact opposite times. During the day, when the vibrant neighbor trees were busy transporting water up their roots and into their leaves, the stump sat dormant. At night, when the neighbors settled down, the stump circulated water through what was left of its body. The trees, it seemed, were taking turns -- serving as separate pumps in a single hydraulic network. So, why add a near-dead tree to your underground nutrient highway? While the stump no longer has any leaves, researchers wrote, it's possible that its roots still have value as a bridge to other vibrant, photosynthesizing trees elsewhere in the forest. It's also possible that the stump joined roots with its neighbors a long time ago, before it was, well, a stump. Since nutrients still flow through the stump's roots and into the rest of the network, the neighboring trees may never have noticed its loss of greenery.
DO NOT CLICK LINK (Score:3, Informative)
It's generating someone some click through money. Instead search google for it. little twats.
Re: DO NOT CLICK LINK (Score:5, Informative)
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It's almost as if you've never seen a /. summary with the words "Link may be paywalled, alternate source [slashdot.org]" in it.
HInt: Link is always paywalled.
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Re:DO NOT CLICK LINK (or do) (Score:2)
It's generating someone some click through money. Instead search google for it. little twats.
The livescience link is a link to the article. The link in the story goes to doi.org, which links to the actual paper summary from Elsevier. doi.org is a non-profit which indexes papers from many scientific publishers as per ISO 26324. It is effectively "owned" by those publishers.
in any case, it is an appropriate link to the the paper summary.
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Not to worry, this is slashdot. Nobody clicks the links!
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Not to worry, this is slashdot. Nobody clicks the links!
Then what causes the Slashdot Effect?
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Now THAT is a real mystery, isn't it!
But think about it...when was the last time you heard of a site being "slashdotted"?
My marriage (Score:5, Funny)
The whole thing seems an apt description of my marriage with kids.
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not to old or Trump will have beaten you there
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I'm thinking that we should kill this varmint as soon as possible. It will soon pull its roots out and start perambulating around like a Triffid. Then it will decide that human blood is a much better source of nutrients, and will try to get all symbiotic with us.
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The whole thing seems an apt description of my marriage with kids.
Weren't you warned about that?
(maybe you were one of those "Hah! Not me !" parents..).
Kauri dieback disease (Score:4, Interesting)
Sadly, Kauri are dying from a fungal disease and they're not entirely sure how to stop it. Sections of NZ forest have been closed to trampers to try to minimise transfer. Many paths have boot washes with disinfectant but too many people don't bother. The disease may also be spread by feral introduced pigs and goats (there are no native land mammals in NZ).
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Sadly, Kauri are dying from a fungal disease and they're not entirely sure how to stop it. Sections of NZ forest have been closed to trampers to try to minimise transfer. Many paths have boot washes with disinfectant but too many people don't bother. The disease may also be spread by feral introduced pigs and goats (there are no native land mammals in NZ).
Fascinating, yet it turns out there are two species of bat native to the Kiwis' island... although the only true flying mammal, they are still considered a land mammal.
Re:Kauri dieback disease (Score:4, Interesting)
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I have heard the the symptoms of Kauri dieback can be treated with a phosphite injection.
Do you know anything about the longterm effectiveness of that treatment with other similar species?
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I worked mostly with azalea/rhododendron and some coniferous trees, mostly nursery/greenhouse plants but some in their natural habitat. Most of what I was involved in was monitoring (collecting/analyzing samples of infected plants or suspected infestations in soil) and prevention: destroying infected stock, ensuring that pots were well drained, and autoclaving soil. I did work somewhat with copper fungicides, but those are usually for fo
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People involved have posted that the boot wash method doesn't kill the spores anyway.
My experience is that even if they did you would need a vastly superior system to remove and/or disinfect all of the dirt from your footwear than what I have seen installed.
The proper solution is to not go in, or to completely clean your footwear at home prior to going in to the Kauri areas. The dirty water should be disposed of down the sewer. This is fairly impractical. So they are closing the tracks, and rebuilding and r
In other news. (Score:2, Funny)
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"Since nutrients still flow through the stump's roots and into the rest of the network, the neighboring trees may never have noticed its loss of greenery."
'What does this even mean?'
It means that trees are kind of stupid that way.
It's like you, holding the office canteen-door open for somebody, even if they don't work there anymore.
Utah tree colony with common roots (Score:1)
There is a tree colony in Utah called Pando [wikipedia.org] which like this, shares a root system and is also a single genetic individual. It's one of if not the oldest known living organism, at 80,000 years. It is also the single heaviest known organism.
However, human interference is now causing the colony to die.
Like a Mycorrhizal network? (Score:3)
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mycorrhizal fungi are symbiotic organisms that associate with plants, and transfer water/nutrients between individuals using a network of fungal hyphae.
Aspen trees are clonal organisms; an entire forest of what looks like individual trees can actually be a single organism that spreads horizontally via underground roots. You can see something similar happen if you plant a single strawberry plant; it will send out
How do you kill a vampire tree? (Score:3, Funny)
For all we know it... (Score:2)
Oh... oh no.... (Score:5, Funny)
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Conceptual integration challenge: Expert
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More like its immediate neighbors looking out for the elderly. I don't think this would work with a nation of slackers, er, I mean a forest of vampire trees.
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Theoretically, kauri trees wouldn't expend resources to exhibit this behavior unless there were some competitive advantage for the species. The authors do briefly speculate on what competitive advantage this might serve (they state that it might aid in drought tolerance and transpiration) but there could be many potential benefits: the NZ native forests are a unique and very exotic habitat in which there is
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Or... nature is telling us that there is no single one-size-fits-all solution to problems, and the necessary strategy is... diversity! (The real kind, not the slogan.)
the first thing we do is kill all the widowers (Score:5, Insightful)
You've jumped to a conclusion that this stump isn't doing its job any more.
The "job" of the bottom half of a tree (its root system) is to extract minerals from the soil, which it probably continues to do just fine, especially when you consider that no one is paying to support the unproductive top half of the tree, which doesn't even exist.
It might help to think of a normal tree as husband and wife. The husband soaks up water and minerals from the ground. The wife harvests valuable sugar and carbon from the air. (If only the wife would also extract nitrogen from the atmosphere where it is beyond plentiful, but no, the husband usually needs to obtain nitrogen on the black mycorrhizal market.)
Then at the first gust of serious adversity, the root system becomes a widower willow and now he's sneaking apple pie off nearby canopy windowsills where baking continues. But quite possibly he's still contributing just as much minerals and nitrogen as he was before, which he deposits on the windowsills in white envelopes.
He's not quite the leach you might suspect, because his sugar consumption is rather low in his widower state: all that sugar required to pump water to his former wife's penthouse suite is no longer required.
Perhaps he's less of a contributor now that he was in the prime of his "proper tree equals a man plus a woman" phase of life. But consider the enormous sunk cost. The mortgage on his hefty subsoil biomass is completely paid off. He's fully integrated into the hydraulic network. And if serious drought came along, he's probably the first in his community to take a long nap in the snow (all those borrowed apple pies would become very hard to obtain) and now his giant carcass is open season for tree cannibalism: a very tasty larder indeed, stuffed full of seed cakes—already fully integrated into the dumbwaiter network.
———
When people point to others who are not "pulling their weight", it's often the case that the person pointing has shit for brains. We tend to substitute scalar metrics when we ourselves are in the desirable married phase of life. But often people who have lost their edge in manning the front lines linger on as the glue that holds the whole ship together.
The Invisible Work That Women Do Around the World [theatlantic.com] — December 2015
The person least likely to acknowledge that corporations also contain a lot of invisible work (and relatively uncompensated contributions) are the rockstar assholes, in order to justify their terrible, entitled social behaviour patterns.
This vampire tree makes for a pretty good rockstar asshole litmus test. If you can see that the root system might still be doing its job (or enough of its job considering sunk costs) then you just might be a rockstar asshole yourself (if perhaps lacking the elite talent that justifies the "rockstar" part).
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You'd be surprised (Score:2)
Vampire tree my ass! (Score:3)
Not only is this tree not secretly sucking the blood of animals at night, it's not even sneaking sap from the other trees. It's part of the supply chain of the other trees. It's more like a middleman tree.
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Without photosynthesis it doesn't even have a water pump. The people writing these stories are complete ignoramuses.
During the day, the trees that have working pumps create positive pressure in the upper part of the tree, and negative pressure in the roots. Then at night, the pump doesn't run, and root pressure increases. This is how the tree respirates; one breath per day.
There isn't some different pump that runs at night. The stump doesn't suck at all. It is force-fed at night by its family.
This is also h
Manners. (Score:2)
Since nutrients still flow through the stump's roots and into the rest of the network, the neighboring trees may never have noticed its loss of greenery.
Of course they have noticed, but they are too polite to say anything.
Send. It. Back. (Score:2)
Cause or effect? (Score:2)
The researchers are playing fast and loose with causality. Maybe this nutrient reversal is what killed the tree in the first place? There's no way to know.