Pando survived 14,000 years, all by itself, until the US Government stepped it to protect it...
LOL! Thanks Red Badger.
Posted on 11/24/2021 12:42:33 PM PST by Red Badger
That’s good, because otherwise it would grow so enormous that there would be no room left for anything else ...
As a young single guy many decades ago, my buds and I reckoned the sizes of such items using the Paul Bunyan measuring system, which is the axe handle. If memory serves, that particular item you mentioned looks approximately 4.5 axe handles wide. At 32 inches per axe handle, the width of that ponderous.... Aaah, er, mmm, you do the math. I think the song lyric, “Baby got back” is pertinent.
This is why I love FR!
How deep the irony that even the government inadvertently admits their record of poor forest management is interfering with the aspen reproduction system.
"More recent observations, however, have shown seedling establishment of new aspen clones is a regular occurrence and can be abundant on sites exposed by wildfire. These findings are summarized in the U.S. Forest Service's Fire Effects Information System:"Kay documented post-fire quaking aspen seedling establishment following 1986 and 1988 fires in Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, respectively. He found seedlings were concentrated in kettles and other topographic depressions, seeps, springs, lake margins, and burnt-out riparian zones. A few seedlings were widely scattered throughout the burns. In Grand Teton National Park, establishment was greatest (950–2,700 seedlings/ha) in 1989, a wet year, but hundreds to thousands of seedlings established each year despite drought conditions in 1986–1988 and 1990–1991. Seedlings surviving past one season occurred almost exclusively on severely burned surfaces."
If true that Pando has been around for thousands of years, it has been through much more severe climate changes than anything in the last 150 years. It’s been through several warmings and coolings and the Little IceAge just for good measure.
I’m trying to figure out how much a 106-acre stand of quaking aspen clones weighs, compared with 2,385 acres of fungi – including all the underground stuff of each.
Math is hard.
I think that Earth itself is one enormous organism.
There’s no way that one part or aspect exists optimally without the others.
And Earth couldn’t exist without the order of the solar system, and ultimately of the Universe.
(Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.)
Pando survived 14,000 years, all by itself, until the US Government stepped it to protect it...
LOL! Thanks Red Badger.
I was just about to post that.
:)
Great X-Files episode on it, too.
Chris Christie?
He should have had his mouth stapled along with his stomach.................
Neither is re-introducing enough cougars/mountain lions and wolves to keep the deer and elk within a healthy balance of prey and predator-that and seasonal deer hunting would bring the ecosystem there into the balance it had before people who had no idea how the natural world works started screwing with it-the fed needs to stay away-far away-and let the game wardens and plant biologists manage the area...
I would tend to prefer adding a hunting season to adding predators that might like to snack on little kids who are camping with their families.
I just hope a leave-it-to-nature and just keep it in balance approach is used in the Pando area-it looks like a beautiful natural area...
You need both the hunting season and the natural predators-we’ve had both in this state for a natural balance for at least 35-40 years, when mountain lions were brought back to areas where they had been hunted out and the deer and other prey animal population was overbred, too large for the food supply and the deer were sickly and dying-things are better balanced now, and black bears have been re-introduced, too...
I don’t know what state you live in, or if you live in a city or rural area-I live in a rural area, and have lived in rural areas most of my life-including some time in another state-where there are mountains, mountain lions and lots of bears-my hubby and I took our cub camping in Big Bend, the mountains of NM, the Guadalupe mts, etc-all wild areas-closest we ever came to being threatened by a predator when camping was when a bear got into our Suburban one night because our cub had left an open package of Oreos in there-if you keep your kids in sight, and don’t let them wander into the woods alone, they will be fine. They are in more danger of being bitten by a rattler than they are of being taken by a mountain lion or bear, or even a pack of coyotes...
There is plenty of natural prey for the large predators here that are easier to obtain than well-guarded kids-living in the country means living with the wild animals-not killing them off-there have not been any mountain lion or bear attacks here on adults or kids-last wild animal predator attack on a human was feral hogs attacking a hunter-and it was not fatal to the hunter-just to the hog...
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