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July 20, 2023
The electrical impulses that pass through the roots of trees, for example, move at the slow rate of one third of an inch per second.
When you know that trees experience pain and have memories and that tree parents live together with their children, then you can no longer just chop them down and disrupt their lives with large machines.
forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.
But together, many trees create an ecosystem that moderates extremes of heat and cold, stores a great deal of water, and generates a great deal of humidity. And in this protected environment, trees can live to be very old.
Every tree, therefore, is valuable to the community and worth keeping around for as long as possible. And that is why even sick individuals are supported and nourished until they recover.
For if they can identify saliva, they must also have a sense of taste.
This is because a tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it.
They shade their offspring with their enormous crowns, and the crowns of all the mature trees close up to form a thick canopy over the forest floor. This canopy lets only 3 percent of available sunlight reach the ground and, therefore, their children’s leaves.
without moisture, food production stops.
There is a honey fungus in Switzerland that covers almost 120 acres and is about a thousand years old.23 Another in Oregon is estimated to be 2,400 years old, extends for 2,000 acres, and weighs 660 tons.
In oak forests alone, more than a hundred different species of fungi may be present in different parts of the roots of the same tree. From the oaks’ point of view, this is a very practical arrangement. If one fungus drops out because environmental conditions change, the next suitor is already at the door.
Each of us sheds about 0.05 ounces of skin cells a day, which adds up to about a pound a year. The numbers are impressive: 10 billion particles flake off us every day.
You can estimate the age of beech forests from quite a distance: the higher the green growth is up the trunk, the older the trees.
Finally, the only other big difference is in the amount of time it takes to process information and translate it into action. Does that mean that beings that live life in the slow lane are automatically worth less than ones on the fast track?
The forest can lose as much as 2,900 tons per square mile per year. The same area can replace only 290 tons annually through the weathering of stones underground, leading to a huge annual loss of soil.
In contrast, forests left undisturbed lose only 1 to 14 tons of soil per square mile per year.
Some species of weevil, mostly those that live on the forest floor, can no longer fly because they have become accustomed to the slow rhythms of the forest and its practically eternal existence. The farthest they can travel is 30 feet a year, and they really don’t need to be able to travel any farther than that.
over the course of their lives, they store up to 22 tons of carbon dioxide in their trunks, branches, and root systems. When they die, the same exact quantity of greenhouse gases is released as fungi and bacteria break down the wood, process the carbon dioxide, and breathe it out again.
less (carbon dioxide) is more (life-span).
elders are markedly more productive than young whippersnappers, and when it comes to climate change, they are important allies for human beings.
During a severe storm, a mature tree can down an additional couple of hundred gallons of water that, thanks to its construction, it funnels to its roots.
trees use up to 8,500 cubic yards of water per square mile, which they release into the air through transpiration. This water vapor creates new clouds that travel farther inland to release their rain.
an organism that is too greedy and takes too much without giving anything in return destroys what it needs for life and dies out.
A single tree contains millions of calories in the form of sugar, cellulose, lignin, and other carbohydrates.
Honeybees also take advantage of aphid excretions. They suck up the sweet droplets, carry them back to their hives, regurgitate them, and turn them into dark forest honey. It is particularly prized by consumers, even though it has absolutely nothing to do with flowers.
Cambium tastes like slightly resinous carrots, and it’s very nutritious.
To keep costs down, brutal methods are sometimes employed. And so, in 2009, tree researcher Dr. Martin Gossner sprayed the oldest (six hundred years old) and mightiest (170 feet tall and 6 feet wide at chest height) tree in the Bavarian Forest National Park. The chemical he used, pyrethrum, is an insecticide, which brought any number of spiders and insects tumbling down to the forest floor—dead. The lethal results show how species-rich life is way up high. The scientist counted 2,041 animals belonging to 257 different species.48
The adult beetle lives for only a few weeks, just long enough to mate. This animal spends most of its life as a larva, which slowly eats its way through the crumbling roots of dead deciduous trees. It can take up to eight years for it to get big and fat enough to pupate.
In total, a fifth of all animal and plant species—that’s about six thousand of the species we know about—depend on dead wood.
As long as the trees are healthy, firs always keep ten, spruce six, and pines three years’ worth of needles, as you can tell by taking a look at the annual growth intervals on their branches.
They wait until a certain number of warm days have passed, and only then do they trust that all is well and classify the warm phase as spring.
Beeches, for example, don’t start growing until it is light for at least thirteen hours a day.
When you take your next walk into the forest, you can check for yourself to see that such behavior really is an individual choice and, therefore, a question of character.
In Fishlake National Forest, Utah, there is a quaking aspen that has taken thousands of years to cover more than 100 acres and grow more than forty thousand trunks. This organism, which looks like a large forest, has been given the name “Pando” (from the Latin “pandere,” which means to spread).
The average speed of the beeches’ journey, by the way, is about a quarter mile—a year.
In contrast, the individual beeches growing in a stand near where I live are as far apart genetically as different species of animals.
Fires left to burn through the forest on this natural cycle usually stay at ground level, getting hot enough to burn away brush in the understory and leaving established trees blackened but unscathed.
A steady movement of air through the forest ensures that all the gases are well mixed at all times, and so the drop in oxygen near the ground is not particularly noticeable.
4 percent of oak deaths in one American city happened because the trees were subjected to light every night.
What we are really seeing is waste light, the rejected part that trees cannot use.
