TWIL #036 - The Largest Living Things on Earth Are Not Whales
The biggest organism by mass isn't a blue whale - it's a clonal aspen colony in Utah that weighs 6,000 tonnes and may be 80,000 years old. The biggest by area is a fungus in Oregon.
- #nature
- #biology
- #ecology
The blue whale is the largest individual animal by mass. But when you open the question to all life, and allow that a single organism can be a genetically identical clone colony, the answers get stranger.
Pando - Latin for "I spread" - is a clonal colony of Quaking Aspen (Populus tremuloides) in Fishlake National Forest, Utah. Its roughly 47,000 tree trunks are all genetically identical and connected by a single shared root system. Together they weigh approximately 6,000 tonnes, cover 43 hectares, and the root system is estimated to be between 14,000 and 80,000 years old.
It is a single organism. Every trunk that grows from the ground is not a separate tree but a stem from the same individual's root network. Individual trunks live about 130 years; the root system survives and generates new trunks continuously.
For the largest by area, the title goes to a honey fungus (Armillaria ostoyae) in the Malheur National Forest in Oregon. It covers approximately 965 hectares (2,385 acres) and is estimated to be between 2,000 and 8,650 years old. Most of it is underground - a network of black fungal threads called rhizomorphs spreading through the soil. The visible mushrooms are just its fruiting bodies.
Both organisms are in decline. Pando is threatened by overgrazing preventing seedling regeneration. The Armillaria is a tree pathogen - its size comes partly at the expense of the forest it grows through.