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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

#111

Post by mirimir »

joelhoffman wrote: post #108
mirimir wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes, it was that one. Thanks.

I sort of remember that it was in Oregon, but doubted myself when I found the one in Washington.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#112

Post by mirimir »

jniedrauer wrote: post #104
arcticfox wrote: post #86

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." 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.

The Romans also did a pretty good job with lead.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#113

Post by njarboe »

kseistrup wrote: post #36
quixoticelixer- wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be highly unlikely that the seeds aren't also capable doing that.

Right. But the clones were made from stumps, not from seed-bearing trees. And even if you used seeds from “old trees”, there would be no guarantee that the entire genome in the seed originated from “old trees”, or that the relevant genes responsible for “getting old” are expressed to the same extend as in the old tree stumps. I'm all for genetic diversity, but I think the researchers have a point when they use living…

Sure. But there are thousands and thousands of really big, old redwood trees that are growing today. It cool and all to clone the biggest old stumps. But they are likely the biggest because they were growing in very good locations. I would say taking almost as big trees from less ideal locations growing today have even a better chance of getting really old and big.

My point is that the stump thing is for marketing to an unknowing public, not based on trying to find the redwood tree genomes that will grow the oldest trees. I was trying to help public be a bit less unknowing on the subject.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#114

Post by LifeLiverTransp »

hinkley wrote: post #83
wybiral wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, even the act of rooting stem cuttings is often referred to as "cloning".

Plants are just a hell of a lot easier to clone than animals.

One of the reasons, there is always some murderous gardener lurking by the greenhouse door, when you visit any botanic garden.

Green thumpers are notorious for taking samples - even from forbidden fruits to grow them at home.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#115

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #107
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?

Totally. Especially considering that plants are a kind of biological machine which works to turn light into plant stuff. This means that how the plant interacts with light can tell you a-lot about the health and well being of the light. A pinch of machine vision, and you are pretty much there.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#116

Post by candiodari »

tsmith5432 wrote: post #38
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…

A plant grown from a cutting is indeed a clone. It is the actual tissue of the original plant, just grown out. Same DNA as the original plant. Only, you use clever techniques to stimulate undifferentiated cells to produce roots. One of the linked articles, however, shows plants growing in little plastic jars. This looks like "tissue culture", which takes a plant cell sample and causes it to grow in a culture medium.…

Exactly. There are many ways plants and even animals reproduce that result in genetically identical offspring and this is generally referred to as cloning.

For bacteria this is usually the normal way of reproducing but it happens in animals like famously sharks. But it happens in chickens, turkeys, reptiles, snakes.

There's also a cool intermediate form, like with plants. Trees and flowers are of course famously both male and female, but usually require sex to reproduce (sex in the sense of contact between male and female reproductive organs, through insects mostly)

There's even controversy because the list of animals that haven't been caught cloning themselves has been growing shorter and shorter over the past 30 years. But of course as soon as anyone points out "given this long list of animals where females can clone themselves, isn't it pretty likely humans do this as well, on occasion", everyone loses their minds (and no, the Jesus argument makes no sense: of course a natural clone is always female).

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#117

Post by jelliclesfarm »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #115
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Totally. Especially considering that plants are a kind of biological machine which works to turn light into plant stuff. This means that how the plant interacts with light can tell you a-lot about the health and well being of the light. A pinch of machine vision, and you are pretty much there.

Thanks. Is this already being done? Or is it a tech waiting to be delivered?

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#118

Post by drieddust »

jspash wrote: post #101
Wintamute wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That makes it sad and horrible.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#119

Post by sgc »

jmspring wrote: post #103
sgc wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it is not.

Re: Arborists Have Cloned Ancient Redwoods from Their Massive Stumps

#120

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #117
RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally. Especially considering that plants are a kind of biological machine which works to turn light into plant stuff. This means that how the plant interacts with light can tell you a-lot about the health and well being of the light. A pinch of machine vision, and you are pretty much there.

Thanks. Is this already being done? Or is it a tech waiting to be delivered?

I'm almost 100% convinced its already being done by private industry; you can do the vast majority of it w.out any ML/AI component. Biggest issue however is that it only makes sense on high margin plants.

See, as it turns out, plants already have this novel/ ingenious way of packaging the data required to make complete copies of into very discrete packages. They're called seeds, and in general, for the vast majority of cases, seeds which are often actually cheaper than dirt are just fine. Only when you have a plant that has certain characteristics (GMO in a non-hereditary trait etc..) does this make real sense.

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