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Citation needed! The Aspen page on Wikipedia doesn't mention fungi at all.
by turnsout 4y ago
Citation needed! The Aspen page on Wikipedia doesn't mention fungi at all.
- tarentel 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
- krisoft 4y agoIt feels this part is what they are asking citation for: "Aspens are weird enough that they may be thought of more like a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies rather than trees per se". At least the second sentence of their comment seems to suggest that. I read the page you kindly linked but I'm not seeing anything about Aspens being considered a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies..
- cschneid 4y agoNot literally, but in style. They are clearly trees. But they exist in a large underground network of roots, and spawn trunks upwards over that large area, not unlike how many funguses do. Convergent evolution of an approach to life.
- finnh 4y agoThanks. I'm definitely a layman here, but I lived in Utah about 10 years ago and did some reading on Aspens, which is when I came across that comparison. I was hoping to find a direct citation to post here but haven't managed to do so yet. A fire (or clear cut) can take down the entire overstory of trees, but that living root system will survive & send up more "suckers" that become new trees. It's this "the real life is underground" vibe that makes them particularly fungi-like to me. I wonder if any other trees are like Aspens in this regard...
- tarentel 4y agoI don't think you're going to find a citation to the original post. I don't think they were saying aspen are a type of fungi just that they act like one in some ways.
- mlyle 4y agoHe's the original commenter. He is saying that he was reading about aspens from experts and they made the comparison that the big clonal set of aspens have a lot of properties we'd normally associate with fungi. He wants to find that original source to share but can't.
- svachalek 4y agoRedwoods also grow like this but not to the same degree. They do form "fairy rings" like mushrooms though.
- m4jor 4y agohttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pano-one-worlds-largest-organisms-dying-180970579/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/pano-one-worlds-la... >Weighing 13 million pounds, Pando is the world’s largest organism by mass (Oregon’s “humungous fungus” spans a greater distance). Quaking aspens can reproduce by disseminating seeds, but more frequently, they send up sprouts from their roots and form a mass of trees aptly known as a “clone.” and I was able to find https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
- turnsout 4y agoThank you! Odd that it's not mentioned in the main article.
- samstave 4y agoWhen I was growing up in Lake Tahoe in the 1980s, I would leave the house in the morning to return at dusk, and I often went on a hike up Ward Creek from my house to the backside of Alpine Meadows. Quaking Aspens were my Spirit Tree and I loved being around them. I didnt know at the time that the groves of Aspen were acually all the same tree. But they had a profound effect on me as I hiked and built stuff from them. I used to chop them down and build tee-pees with pine bows as walls... I was like 13 or so. If you got caught in any of my booby-traps, I am sorry...
- xenadu02 4y agoIMHO that stretches the definition a bit. They're clones that happen to have an interconnected root system. Does that really make them the "same" organism? Not in any useful sense of "same".
- freilanzer 4y agoClones sharing a root system definitely sounds like being the same organism, if you ask me.