[HN Gopher] The extraordinary lives of coast redwoods
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The extraordinary lives of coast redwoods
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 75 points
Date : 2024-03-06 23:22 UTC (1 days ago)
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| tfwnopmt wrote:
| >"We still don't know why they get so high, nor why they're not
| even taller"
|
| We do know why they don't get taller - past a certain height the
| trees can no longer draw water and nutrients up to the top. Foggy
| conditions can help the physics/chemistry limits, up to a point.
| someone7x wrote:
| They eventually reveal the same conclusion, but with less
| certainty:
|
| > The answers to the "Why so tall?" and "Why not taller?"
| questions seem to involve water, as is the case for so much
| about trees.
|
| > Ultimately, it's most likely a matter of hydraulics: A tree's
| height appears to be limited by the enormous effort needed to
| lift water through tiny tubes, or xylem -- the transport tissue
| that constitutes most of its mass.
| DinaCoder99 wrote:
| Given that the canopy itself modulates the moisture in the air,
| this explanation seems to provide a bound on the outlier of
| height relative to other trees more so than an absolute
| barrier.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Yes, there's a reason all the tallest trees recorded are a bit
| more than 100m high.
|
| That's basically the upper limit to get water to the leaves up
| top
| idontwantthis wrote:
| But we also don't fully know how trees draw up water.
| wiredfool wrote:
| > Dropping the salamanders into a wind tunnel and using high-
| speed cameras, researchers showed that the reptiles assume a
| stable skydiving posture,
|
| This sounds like something that needs to be in the IgNobels.
| pmcarlton wrote:
| Hopefully even the IgNobels will insist that salamanders not be
| referred to as reptiles!
| because_789 wrote:
| I was happy to see the word "bolus" in this essay.
| block_dagger wrote:
| Discussion of redwoods makes me think of The Elephant in the
| Brain, which offers a solid explanation of why they are so tall
| and why humans are so intelligent. Short answer: individuals are
| competing within the species to outdo each other having sapped
| resources from other species.
| chasil wrote:
| Factual summary:
|
| - There are only three remaining redwood species in the world
| (China's Dawn redwood, sequoia, and West coast)
|
| - A mature redwood adds, on average, a ton of wood to its mass
| every year.
|
| - 96% of West coast redwoods' habitat has been lost.
|
| - "Albino" redwoods exist that make no/little chlorophyll,
| surviving by alternate means.
|
| - Some West coast redwood trees are 2,200 years old and reach up
| to 400 feet in height.
|
| - Tall redwoods exert two million pounds of hydraulic force
| raising water to upper leaves.
|
| - A fallen redwood was weighed at 3,630 tons, more than 16 times
| heavier than the Statue of Liberty.
|
| - The marbled murrelet (Brachyramphus marmoratus), an endangered
| seabird lives in the canopy. Its flight speed is up to a hundred
| miles an hour. The first nesting site was discovered in 1974 and
| nesting habits were completely unknown until then.
|
| - Redwoods can endure fire, and appear to be evolving for greater
| heat endurance.
| swyx wrote:
| ai generated? what tool
| MiguelVieira wrote:
| > 96% of West coast redwoods' habitat has been lost.
|
| To be clear, redwoods still grow in almost all of their former
| range. They were logged, but they grew back. About 4% was never
| logged and is old-growth.
|
| You can see a map of the redwood range (light green) and
| remaining old-growth (dark green) here:
|
| https://redwoodhikes.com
| VHRanger wrote:
| What's extraordinary is how ordinary massive trees used to be in
| North America.
|
| http://www.oldgrowth.ca/the-past-isnt-what-it-used-to-be/
|
| Even in Ontario we used to have forests where a large portion of
| trees were above 50m high, some close to the size of coast
| redwoods.
|
| The entire west coast looked like this before clear cutting in
| the 1800s
| canadiantim wrote:
| That's wild, I had no idea (and I live in Ontario). Thanks for
| sharing!
| Althuns wrote:
| Lived in North Idaho for a time and int the forests you can
| still see a ton of massive stumps that don't match anything
| currently surviving nearby. It's a surreal and saddening
| experience.
| divbzero wrote:
| Are there any swaths of land on Earth where old growth forests
| have not been clear cut? Perhaps parts of northern Canada?
| knodi123 wrote:
| sure- parks and such. maybe "swath" is bigger than I
| pictured....
| thresh wrote:
| Uh, Siberia and Russian European North.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Borneo has a huge area of primary forest, though it has been
| extensively logged. And of course the Amazon, the Congo,
| areas of Uganda, and many others.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Even in Ontario we used to have forests where a large
| portion of trees were above 50m high
|
| There are still some in Michigan:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartwick_Pines_State_Park
| idontwantthis wrote:
| > the tallest carbon-bearing organisms on Earth.
|
| What _on Earth_ is outside of that qualifier??
| knodi123 wrote:
| They're trying to avoid the embarrassment of a retraction in
| case someone invents interstellar FTL travel and finds a
| counterexample.
| deepfriedchokes wrote:
| Stories like this need pictures.
| julienchastang wrote:
| Speaking of which, absolutely love that first and only picture
| at the top of the article. However, I am pretty sure that is a
| Sequoiadendron giganteum and not a Sequoia sempervirens which
| are the coastal redwoods the article speaks about.
| farzinadil wrote:
| If you can, you should visit Redwood National Park.
| m463 wrote:
| there's both majesty and tragedy walking through the california
| redwoods.
|
| The old-growth trees are amazing giants.
|
| The other redwoods are beautiful too, until you start seeing the
| pattern of a ring of redwoods, surrounding the stump or hole
| where an old-growth redwood grew for thousands of years before
| just about everything was cut down to rebuild san francisco after
| the 1906 earthquake
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