Big, Bigger, Biggest!

by David Sugarman

Quick. What's the biggest living thing on Earth?

Blue whale?

Nope.

Giant redwood tree?

Guess again. The prize goes to a tree all right, but not anything that looks like a single big tree.

Scientists in Utah have identified a quaking aspen as the biggest living organism on Earth, weighing 6,600 tons! You've seen aspens before — slender trees with leaves that flutter in the slightest breeze, but what makes this one so big?

If you were to go and have a look at it yourself, you'd probably be fooled. It looks like a grove of aspens covering 200 acres. But, they're all part of the same tree.

Scientists took samples from all the aspens in this forest and found that they're all clones - genetically identical. And they're all connected to a single parent tree. New sprouts called suckers grow from the roots of the parent aspen. The suckers are protected by the grove, and the young trees can get their nutrients from the parent's roots until their own are well established.

This may be why quaking aspen is the most widely distributed tree in North America. And aspen root systems can remain dormant for centuries, until the right conditions exist for the suckers to produce the young trees stems, called ramets (there's a new Scrabble® word for you).

And to top it off, by checking out fossilized aspens, scientists have determined that some of these aspen clones may be more than a million years old.

So the next time you hear the rustle of aspen leaves, take a look at an example of natural cloning—another way for life to make its way.