Key takeaways
- Pando, a quaking aspen grove in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest, is a single clone of an estimated 47,000 trunks growing from one root system across 106 acres. Mule deer browsing now keeps most of its new shoots from surviving.
- Socotra’s dragon blood trees now occupy about 5% of their estimated habitat, and seedlings can take up to 100 years to grow tall enough to escape grazing goats.
- The trees of Namibia’s Deadvlei died about 900 years ago when the clay pan dried up, and the climate is so dry that they still haven’t decomposed.
- About 400 pines in Poland’s Crooked Forest grow in a J shape with the curve pointing north, and no one knows for sure why.
- An earthquake in 1911 set off a landslide that formed Kazakhstan’s Lake Kaindy and drowned its trees. Algae and other water plants now cover the trunks below the surface.
From eerie Australian lyrebirds, natural mimics that can repeat nearly any sound they hear, to the pouty Galapagos red-lipped batfish haunting equatorial oceans deep, the discerning observer knows that nature is quite often stranger than fiction.
While bright red lips on a deepwater fish may seem unnecessary, scientists surmise it has to do with reproduction, helping this species identify potential mates amongst all the fish in the sea. And thats just one example of how species sometimes adapt to their environment in bizarre and mind-bending ways.
Fans of all things weird and wonderful will be pleased to know that trees and forests are no exception to this rule, and the amazing trees below are proof.
Keeping Forests Standing
Unique forests are often some of the most fragile ones, and several on this list are declining because the youngest trees never get the chance to replace the oldest. At Pando, mule deer have browsed new aspen shoots so heavily for decades that almost no young stems survive, according to a 2018 study. Working from 72 years of aerial photographs, the team found that one section protected by earlier restoration is recovering well, while most of the grove is thinning through attrition. A larger eight-foot fence built later is failing as deer slip through weak points or jump it, and about half of the clone remains unfenced.
The U.S. Forest Service and its partners now test methods that encourage Pando's roots to send up new shoots, tracking each treated area through research plots, while the nonprofit Friends of Pando works on monitoring and restoration.
In Yemen, Socotra's dragon blood trees face a similar problem on a far slower timeline. Habitat fragmentation, livestock grazing and climate change have reduced the species to a fraction of its native range, and the trees now occupy about 5% of their estimated habitat. Seedlings can take up to 100 years to grow tall enough to escape grazing goats, making it one of the slowest-growing trees in the world, and two cyclones in 2015 uprooted many adult trees.
In the village of Diksam, residents care for a nursery of saplings that researchers use to study growth and mortality rates, and the village guards the entrance to one of the last remaining groves.
