Old Tjikko, the oldest living clonal Norway Spruce | Hacker News Reader

Old Tjikko, the oldest living clonal Norway Spruce

en.wikipedia.org

98 pointsshawndumas26 comments

Wikipedia article is far more informative and far less spammy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko

This article states that it is not the oldest tree since its a clonal tree and not an individual. So I am confused, is it the oldest or not?

There are older clonal trees. They have dated genetic material matching this tree that is that old, but since the species can be clonal, that old genetic material is likely from an older clone and not the current individual.

Again, from 'pedia

oldest clonal colony is probably https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)#Size_and_age

80,000-100,000 years old!

I come back to this one time and time again. Blows my mind to think about the fact that all of A.D. time is just a tiny fraction of what this organism has lived through.

Thanks, now I'm reading wikipedia articles about trees instead of working

Ok, we changed the URL to that from http://themindcircle.com/worlds-oldest-tree-old-tjikko-swede.... If someone suggests a better URL we can change it again.

We also changed "9,500-Year-Old Tree Found in Sweden Is the World’s Oldest Tree" to "Old Tjikko, the oldest living clonal Norway Spruce". That has to be the largest energy drop by an HN title in a while.

For an even older tree, see Pando[1]. (HN previous discussion on Pando[2].) (And according to Wikipedia[3], the designation "World's Oldest Tree" would seem to be incorrect here.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9798911

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko

Also interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomatia_tasmanica

"King's Lomatia is unusual because all of the remaining plants are genetically identical. Because it has three sets of chromosomes (a triploid) and is therefore sterile, reproduction occurs only vegetatively ... the plant has been cloning itself for at least 43,600 years (possibly up to 135,000 years)"

One of the cooler things about old trees is that the oldest ones tend to be puny, pathetic looking, twisted little individuals, because they grow very slowly and are often weather-beaten. The slow growth is because they tend to be located in exposed areas that have little soil and therefore not much storage for water, which limits growth but also reduces risk from fires, fungus, and other pests that jump from tree to tree. They may also be at the treeline, where temperature is a limiting growth factor as well.

One of the first papers to document this is a paper by E. Schulman of Caltech in 1957, called Longevity under Adversity in Conifers [0]. Since then, this has been confirmed extensively in many more environments and tree families than Schulman analyzed. The basics are that slower growth minimizes resource use as well as the attack surface to pests, so the organisms can subsist for thousands of years until they are killed by climate change, or more frequently, the ground eroding out beneath them. It's somewhat reminiscent of the stereotypical monk/lama/mystic living an ascetic life in a cave in the mountains high above the gluttonous cities. However, the basic ideas of finding a niche on the fringe, limiting risk exposure and resource use, and staying small for a long time are completely inappropriate to the tech community, of course.

[0]: http://wmrc.edu/history/docs/science-1954.pdf

(edited for clarity)

I can't help but feeling a bit sad for this tree. It's been living there, alone, with no other comrades, for thousands of years, silently giving us oxygen without asking for anything in return. Maybe people should plant a few trees of its kind around it, so that this fellow can belong to a social network. [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/world/europe/german-forest...

The picture shows that it's surrounded by comrades. Those comrades are the shrubs around it. Until recently, this tree was the same way. Quoting the Wikipedia entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Tjikko :

> For thousands of years, the tree appeared in a stunted shrub formation (also known as a krummholz formation) due to the harsh extremes of the environment in which it lives. During the warming of the last century, the tree has sprouted into a normal tree formation

A shrub is not a tree. (:

in this case it is, it's literally the same organism as they share the same roots. Though that would make it lonely again I guess.

Read it again. "For thousands of years, the tree appeared in a stunted shrub formation (also known as a krummholz formation)"

At least they didn't find that out by cutting it down!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_(tree)

I bet this guy feels a lot better now!

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-one-man-acciden...

According to the Wikipedia article referenced here, "the age of the tree was determined by carbon dating of genetically matched plant material collected from under the tree"

There's a tree on my campus called the George Washington Elm; http://www7.nau.edu/arboretum/Littleman/washington_elm.html

It was apparently grown from a rooted sprig of the tree under which George Washington assumed command Of The Continental Army on July 3, 1775

Genuinely curious; does this mean the George Washington Elm tree here would be classified as being over 250 years old?

Sucky title, it's the oldest _clonal_ tree in Norway.

It’s not in Norway, it’s a Norway Spruce that’s in Sweden.

Are you suggesting that spruce migrate?

So once people die off the remaining trees will become old growth forests :-) More seriously though, I love the fact that 9500 years ago sea level was 120M lower than it is today. I feel bad for people who lived in coastal cities back then but thinking about how much the world changes in relatively short time spans reminds me how dynamic it is. Never a dull moment on earth!

It helped those in coastal Asiatic cities walk to North America, so there was some upside as well...

Post-glacial rebound means that land in some parts of the world is still rising after being pressed down by the weight of glaciers.

There are Nordic place names with terms like "island", places that were one coastal villages now far from the sea, and Lake Mälaren, once part of the Baltic, became a freshwater lake about 800 years ago.

In some areas the land rise is 1cm per year, and is noticeable in someone's lifetime. (The only comparison picture I could find is http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ppAQwRyWqWM/VBtDKBWso5I/AAAAAAAAAK... from http://sburnadventure.blogspot.com/2014/09/kayaking-finnish-... )

I swear it doesn't look a day over 8,000.

Yggdrasil! ;)

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