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Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

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Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#101

Post by jspash »

Wintamute wrote: post #26
drieddust wrote: post #7

That stump is sad reminder of greedy destruction we have bought to the world. I hope we can reverse it.

The people that felled that tree for its essential raw materials did so under hardships and conditions thankfully many of us will never know, and not in small part due to the toil and labour of previous generations.

"It would have been the biggest tree alive today had it not been so ignominiously felled in 1890 – reputedly to satisfy a drunken bet about making a table big enough to seat 40 guests from a single slice of tree-trunk."

source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/reborn-the-g...

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#102

Post by mark-r »

bduerst wrote: post #98
mark-r wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that they appear to be establishing groves of genetically identical trees, so sexual reproduction is irrelevant. Unless you're planting next to an established forest.

The difference still lay in that the groves are still genetically different from each other, unlike bananas which are the same genetic organism planted on thousands of acres.

That does no good unless the groves are close enough to allow interbreeding. From what I understand they're trying to establish these groves all around the world, and most won't have any neighbors.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#103

Post by jmspring »

sgc wrote: post #80
simplecomplex wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are any of those issues comparable to cutting all the trees down? Fires and beatles and dead wood are natural.

Japanese beetles are not native to the area and wipe out hundreds of thousands of acres at a time. Then it is a tinder box.

Drive Sonora pass sometime and look "south". So much dead forest. That isn't particularly natural.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#104

Post by jniedrauer »

arcticfox wrote: post #86
jniedrauer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only human activity so far on a large enough scale to impact the biosphere as a whole is fossil fuel use. If you want to count that as "terraforming." We could add nuclear weapons to that list, if we ever decided to use them.

> The only human activity so far on a large enough scale to impact the biosphere as a whole is fossil fuel use. If you want to count that as "terraforming." I must be misunderstanding you; the majority of places in the world today are radically different than they were pre-human. That seems pretty inarguable.

It's death by a thousand cuts though. A bunch of localized effects that add up. That's not "terraforming." No one thing has impacted the entire planet except for fossil fuels. We dispersed a lot of lead globally in the mid 20th century, but that was also fossil fuel related. Plastic buildup in the ocean is also fossil fuel related. And of course the atmospheric changes.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#105

Post by jniedrauer »

kaybe wrote: post #76
jniedrauer wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only human activity so far on a large enough scale to impact the biosphere as a whole is fossil fuel use. If you want to count that as "terraforming." We could add nuclear weapons to that list, if we ever decided to use them.

No, the changes in land use had significant and detectable impacts far before that. The albedo change between forest and fields alone is quite large.

These are all localized effects. A lot of localized effects can add up to global changes, but they're not the same thing. Terraforming implies global changes.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#106

Post by User23 »

josefresco wrote: post #57
User23 wrote: post #3

I always wonder how grafting and budding were discovered.

This might help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting#History,_society_and_...

Thanks for the link. I meant in a more narrative sense though. I like to imagine that some fool cut down a tree and changed his or her mind and tried to stick it back together and lo and behold it worked.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#107

Post by jelliclesfarm »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #91

Total aside, but as an undergraduate, I was part of the school tissue culture club. We brought 'albino' redwoods into culture and made a pretty hefty profit selling carnivorous plants on Fridays. We did a tour of a local redwood companies tissue culture lab, and almost all the employees were female, and a fair few had developed severe arthritis in their work. Was very depressing to see.

Would it be possible to automate tissue culture with precision robotics?

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#108

Post by joelhoffman »

mirimir wrote: post #65
matco11 wrote: post #28

“Cloning” here seems the wrong (click-batey) choice of words. They have horticulturally propagated redwood trees - that’s a relatively simple technique, commonly used by your average gardener. What’s special here is that they found which conditions maximize the yield of the redwoods propagation and they are planting colonies of the new trees in areas around the world that offer particularly good/promising climatic co…

> As these are very large trees, establishing large colonies can have a relatively meaningful impact in carbon capture. Also, they're fast growing, so they capture carbon quickly, and store it for a long time. Plus the fact that, if they're harvested, the wood is relatively rot-resistant. So carbon could be stored over even longer periods, if the wood were used for ~permanent structures. Still, there's something iron…

It might have also been this one: http://www.oregonphotos.com/Sitka-Spruce.html

-- it was destroyed by a windstorm in 2007, but I believe it did have such a sign before that. Probably all of the "worlds biggest" trees do.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#109

Post by jbrazile »

rsync wrote: post #79
Dowwie wrote: post #35

Fun fact: Metasequoia are in New York City and New Jersey. Around the five boroughs are 100 year old, towering Dawn redwood! I have even seen full grown trees in Cresskill, NJ. Recently, a two year art exhibit in Brooklyn [1] concluded that used more than four thousand live, baby Metasequoia. All of the trees have since found new homes, but I am unsure where the recipients are. I now have a baby Metasequoia growing i…

Thank you. Another surprising redwood tree is in the "Rieterpark" in central Zurich.

And further down the lake of Zurich was this one planted in 1860:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.2305482,8.6713386,3a,60y,287...

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#110

Post by samatman »

Exuma wrote: post #5
ZachWick wrote: post #2

I went to a planting a few years ago put on by this same group in Ann Arbor, MI at the Nichols Arboretum [0]. It was pretty inspiring to see a real living clone and hear David Milarch speak about the science and art of cloning these old growth trees. IIRC, the clones planted in Ann Arbor are from one of the Giant Sequoias at [1] in northern MI. [0] http://sustainability.umich.edu/events/sequoia-planting [1] https://w…

I had ego death from 1/4 of mushrooms in that amazing place many years ago. Such a beautiful little area that will be with me until I die.

Huh, can say the same actually.

Small world.

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