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Lodgepole Pine Trees Send Chemical Warning to Each Other when Pine Beetles Attack

posted by martyb on Thursday August 08 2019, @05:20PM   
from the don't-bug-me! dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Lodgepole pines attacked by mountain pine beetles release volatile chemical compounds to warn related trees of the incoming threat, according to a new University of Alberta study.

[...]The messages from the attacked tree can only be decoded by its closest relatives, not by strangers, said Altaf Hussain, a Ph.D. candidate who led the study.

"This communication between the neighboring related pines allows the healthy trees to prepare for the attack by boosting up their chemical defenses," he added.

[...]"As far as I know, there is no research that shows kinship support through volatile organic chemicals, so it's quite exciting," Hussain explained.

Mountain pine beetles are a serious threat to Canada's forests. Native to British Columbia, the beetles used to play a crucial role in renewing lodgepole pine populations. The warming climate of recent years made the beetle population explode and cross the Rocky Mountains into Alberta.

Because the beetles are capable of killing most species of pines in North America, scientists now anticipate their migration will continue through the boreal forest all the way to the East Coast in coming decades, leaving a trail of economic and ecological devastation.

More information: Altaf Hussain et al. Spatial characteristics of volatile communication in lodgepole pine trees: Evidence of kin recognition and intra-species support, Science of The Total Environment (2019). DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2019.07.211

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Original Submission

• Borrowed evolution (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 09 2019, @12:35PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 09 2019, @12:35PM (#877868)

  What makes the Counting Pines particularly noteworthy, however, is the way they count.

  Being dimly aware that human beings had learned to tell the age of a tree by counting the rings, the original Counting Pines decided that this was
  why humans cut trees down.

  Overnight every Counting Pine readjusted its genetic code to produce, at about eye-level on its trunk, in pale letters, its precise age. Within a year they were felled almost into extinction by the ornamental house number plate industry, and only a very few survive in hard-to-reach areas.

  The six Counting Pines in this clump were listening to the oldest, whose gnarled trunk declared it to be thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and thirty-four years old. The conversation took seventeen years, but has been speeded up.
  'I remember when all this wasn't fields.'
  The pines stared out over a thousand miles of landscape. The sky flickered like a bad special effect from a time travel movie. Snow appeared, stayed for an instant, and melted.
  'What was it, then?' said the nearest pine.
  'Ice. If you can call it ice. We had proper glaciers in those days. Not like the ice you get now, here one season and gone the next. It hung around for ages.'
  'What happened to it, then?'
  'It went.'
  'Went where?'
  'Where things go. Everything's always rushing off.'
  'Wow. That was a sharp one.'
  'What was?'
  'That winter just then.'
  'Call that a winter? When I was a sapling we had winters -'
  Then the tree vanished.
  After a shocked pause for a couple of years, one of the clump said: 'He just went! Just like that! One day he was here, next he was gone!'
  If the other trees had been humans, they would have shuffled their feet.
  'It happens, lad,' said one of them, carefully.'He's been taken to a Better Place,' you can be sure of that. He was a good tree.'
  The young tree, which was a mere five thousand, one hundred and eleven years old, said: 'What sort of Better Place?'*
  'We're not sure, ' said one of the clump. It trembled uneasily in a week- long gale.'But we think it involves . . . sawdust.'
  Since the trees were unable even to sense any event that took place in less than a day, they never heard the sound of axes.

  * In this case, three better places. The front gates of Nos 31, 7, and 34 Elm Street. Ankh-Morpork.