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Comment by noisy_boy | Hacker News Reader

If they are all identical DNA, doesn't it make them exceptionally susceptible to something that finds a weak spot in that DNA? Will we hear about the world's largest organism wiped out in world's widest reaching wipeout?

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This sort of thing has probably happened many times in Earth's history. Homogeneity works great until it doesn't.

Spot on. The cavendish banana even recruited a globally present mammal species to spread its clones into all latitudes where it can grow, on both hemispheres. And it's not looking too well for it.

(now my brain is playing that song from the chiquita banana ad on loop that was based on Carmen Miranda in The Gang's All Here, as if that movie hadn't already saturated the worldwide demand for banana advertisement for decades)

Not looking well in what sense?

In the sense that the Gros Michel [1] was the most popular banana until 1950 when most of the cultivar were destroyed by the Panama disease. The Cavendish also has this problem [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel_banana

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavendish_banana#Diseases

It might if this "something" is persistent or widespread enough to affect all of the separate colonies of it; it sounds like there are individual patches that are spread out over many kilometers.

That "something" can a physical factor like temperature rise or acidity change. Temperature rise is known to have killed some large corals.

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