Ginkgo trees can live for several millennia, but a recently published scientific article suggests that even the oldest trees are not immortal. A new study has found that the ginkgo tree, which can live for over 1,000 years, does not show the expected effects of aging – the ginkgo tree appears poised for immortality.
Trees cannot live forever. Many trees stop aging at some point during their existence, but these are typically killed by environmental factors. Such factors that kill elder trees include deforestation, weather phenomena, and a lack of useful nutrients in the soil. Hazardous fungi may infect the root system as well.
Sergi Munne-Bosch, a plant biologist at the University of Barcelona, wrote a paper in response to a January study of the ginkgo tree, which can live for more than 1,000 years. In his review, plant biologist Serge Munne-Bosch argues that while long-lived trees can survive these methods for thousands of years, the stress associated with senescence, even the smallest, can ultimately prevent immortality.
Trees Can Live for Absurd Durations
In a forum published July 27 in the journal Trends in Plant Science, plant biologist Sergi Munne-Bosch argued that while long-lived trees may show signs of senescence that are barely visible to humans, that doesn’t mean they are immortal. While trees are not immortal, Munne-Bosch suggests that it is important to study their strategies for delaying and managing the aging process.
In a recent article, Professor Munne-Bosch argues that even old trees have the potential to die of senescence unless something else kills them first. According to Professor Munne-Bosch, the researchers’ data on Ginkgo biloba shows that older trees have thinner vascular tissue, suggesting that possibly age-related degradation is more pronounced in older trees.
In some populations, this could lead to “negative aging,” a phenomenon in which the longevity of old trees means they actually have a better chance of surviving than younger ones, says Sergi Munne-Bosch. Yet despite this deterioration, it states that older trees are more likely to die from insects, disease, fire, drought, or logging than from old age. For these reasons, a very old tree is much more likely to die from external causes than from age-related causes.
Trees Eventually Die from Natural Causes
The tree may not die of old age, but after enough time, simple statistics suggest that it will die from other causes. Most trees will die, and periodically, without killing the entire tree. The longer a tree is around, the more likely something will happen that will cause it to die.
Some trees can live for thousands of years, but we can’t exist long enough to really know if they will die of old age. The problem is that there are so few olive trees that it’s hard to get data to determine if they’re dying of old age.
Not surprisingly, trees generally live longer than humans and the rest of the planet. Trees may have a lifespan, but they don’t have a fixed lifespan like animals do. Trees exist as long as they basically exist because they are non-hierarchical organisms. While it is not known for certain whether individual trees are biologically immortal to the same extent, they certainly do not age in the same way that animals do.
Gingko Trees are Studied for Plant Aging
A recent article examining ginkgo, one of the world’s longest-lived trees, even found that ginkgo can “avoid aging at the plant-wide level,” raising the question of ancient trees’ apparent lack of aging. According to a January study, 600-year-old trees aren’t even the oldest trees known.
An article on Gingko published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the 600-year-old trees were healthy and robust in terms of reproduction and photosynthesis. This confirmed that the ancient ginkgo biloba trees were as healthy as the young ones, says Professor Munne-Bosch.
Serge Munne-Bosch, a plant biologist at the University of Barcelona and author of a new review on the topic, thinks researchers studying long-lived ginkgo trees may simply not have waited long enough to see these 600-year-old trees finally slipping away. Brooks. Hayes reports for United News International. Paleobotanist Richard Barclay explained that the researchers who studied long-lived ginkgo trees in the January study no longer included trees older than 1,000 years, so they could not extrapolate their results to the known age of ginkgo trees. limitGenetic analysis of the tree’s vascular cambium, the thin layer of cells that lie beneath the cortex and generate new living tissue, showed no “evidence of senescence” or cell death, the authors wrote.
An article published in Trends in Plant Science, “Longevity Trees Are Not Immortal,” argues that even the oldest trees have physiological limitations. A study published in April found that slow-growing, long-lived and exceptionally large trees make up most of the biomass in forests. The slow-growing trees explain why targeted forest protection is critical to curbing climate change and improving predictions about the planet’s future, the researchers say. For example, storms can cause branches to fall, which can put trees at greater risk of contracting diseases…struck by lightning or swept away by storms.