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posted by chromas on Tuesday July 28 2020, @07:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the old-and-grumpy dept.

Despite debate, even the world's oldest trees are not immortal:

The oldest trees on Earth have stood for nearly five millennia, and researchers have long wondered to what extent these ancient organisms undergo senescence, physically deteriorating as they age. A recent paper studying ginkgoes, one of the world's longest-lived trees, even found that they may be able to "escape senescence at the whole-plant level," raising questions about the apparent lack of aging in centuries-old trees. However, in a Forum publishing July 27 in the journal Trends in Plant Science, plant biologist Sergi Munné-Bosch argues that although signs of senescence in long-lived trees may be almost imperceptible to people, this does not mean that they're immortal.

[...] Despite trees' well-evolved methods of prolonging the aging process, research has shown that they still undergo physiological stress associated with senescence. "They have limits," says Munné-Bosch. "There are physical and mechanical constraints that limit their ability to live indefinitely."

However, due to the difficulty of conducting research on trees with such long lifespans, little is known about what the process of senescence looks like. Simply finding enough millennial trees to study can be challenging. "When a species of tree can live for five millennia, it's very difficult to find even two trees that are between two and five millennia," says Munné-Bosch. For these long-lived trees, dying of senescence is a possibility, but the probability of dying from other causes is significantly higher. "They don't have to worry about senescence because they have other things that worry them more," he says.

Journal Reference:
Li Wang, Jiawen Cui, Biao Jin, et al. Multifeature analyses of vascular cambial cells reveal longevity mechanisms in old Ginkgo biloba trees [open], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1916548117)


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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:01AM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:01AM (#1027862) Homepage
    Pando's thought to be at least 70000 years old. OK, even she seems tobe getting old now and starting to fail, but why they're bothering with silly young single-shoot trees, I don't know.
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:26AM (#1027890)

    >
    Pando is currently thought to be dying. Though the exact reasons are not known, it is thought to be a combination of factors including drought, grazing, human development, and fire suppression

    In other words humans
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) [wikipedia.org]