photo by Steph Wilson on unsplash@stephwilll
The heaviest living organism on Earth is a 108-acre clonal colony of quaking aspen trees on the Fishlake National Forest in south central Utah.
In his book Trees: From Root to Leaf, author and tree expert Paul Smith describes the colony, known as ‘Pando’:
“Clonal colonies reproduce asexually from root suckers rather than seed, with older parts of the colony dying off and being replaced with newer shoots. Genetically, these are the same organism, but they are constantly being renewed, and therefore can live for much longer than an individual tree.
“An age of 80,000 years has been postulated for Pando, but this is now thought to be unlikely given the colony would have had to survive the last ice age just 10,000 years ago.”
