aspen trees in a grove. They may look like individuals, but, in fact, aspens grow as clonal eruptions from underground rootstock, all interconnected, all sharing the same genome, sometimes including hundreds of trees across a wide area. The grove is the individual. By one accounting, the largest organism on Earth may be a single aspen clone composed of thousands of trees spread across more than a hundred acres in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest. It weighs about thirteen million pounds, this aspen individual, and is roughly eighty thousand years old.
