The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
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Re: The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
#2As a West Coast native, I wasn't familiar with this rather significant piece of American Natural History, until I started reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers. I highly recommend the book, it features several heartfelt narratives about the various people who have come to this country to start their own 'roots'.
I hope we can help the American Chestnut recover. From the descriptions in the novel above, it must have been quite a beautiful scene to have such large, hearty, majestic trees, dumping bushels of shelf stable food, and of course the beautiful color changes of deciduous trees.
The article goes into some genetic modifications to the chestnut, which is always a wonderfully hot topic. I'm glad to see the technology being used outside of securing corporate profits, but I still fear our hubris can lead to a disastrous outcome in the ecosystem. We're smart, but we're not always good at realizing our limitations.
Wonderful article, thanks for sharing.
Re: The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
#3I actually saw the last surviving American chestnut tree in Pennsylvania.
It was a lone tree on a hillside for miles around.
Those nuts too are still being harvest for biogenetic rework.
Re: The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
#4This is exciting. The American Chestnut is an amazing tree that once grew with trunks as wide as a car. The article did not mention that once the blight was discovered, there was somewhat of a panic to harvest them, which rather reduced the genetic diversity and ruined the possibility of any natural resistance. The horrendous effect our species has on the diversity of life is incredibly sad, re: Dodos and Carrier Pigeons and likely thousands of other unique species. But I would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease, the bacteria that causes wet dog smell, and Cryphonectria parasitica went extinct never to appear again.
Re: The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
#5I actually saw the last surviving American chestnut tree in Pennsylvania. It was a lone tree on a hillside for miles around. Those nuts too are still being harvest for biogenetic rework.
Last surviving mature tree. There are vast numbers of saplings all over Appalachia. They die quickly as they mature, but the roots are alive and keep producing new sprouts. As the article points out, in some areas where the coal companies took all the soil away (and therefore the fungus spores), the chestnuts can reach significant size before they get infected and die, but they always will get the blight eventually.
Re: The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
#6Interesting, because in Europe we have Cameraria ohridella [0] which wreak havoc on horse chestnuts. The moth replicates like crazy and the only recourse is collecting and burning fallen leaves every year. Luckily it looks worse than it is for the trees, they loose their leaves in August, but by then most of a years photosynthesis is done ( just losing like 17%)
Anyhow American chestnuts are bad hosts for the moths, so a lot of newly planted chestnuts are the American variant.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse-chestnut_leaf_miner
Re: The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
#7This is exciting. The American Chestnut is an amazing tree that once grew with trunks as wide as a car. The article did not mention that once the blight was discovered, there was somewhat of a panic to harvest them, which rather reduced the genetic diversity and ruined the possibility of any natural resistance. The horrendous effect our species has on the diversity of life is incredibly sad, re: Dodos and Carrier Pig…
> would not cry if the biting mosquito that spreads disease [...] went extinct
Now now, ecological disasters are only permitted if they make a few people temporarily very wealthy.
Globally improving everyone and their descendants' life a bit, without even paying for it, is just not okay. They can just constantly fumigate themselves with decreasingly effective chemicals to deal with it.
Re: The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
#8Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Re: The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
#9There is an old chestnut orchard in the Santa Cruz mountains above Silicon Valley that has the Asian, European AND American chestnut species. American chestnut has the smallest nuts of the three, but they are the sweetest and best tasting.
Re: The demise and potential revival of the American chestnut
#10Interesting, because in Europe we have Cameraria ohridella [0] which wreak havoc on horse chestnuts. The moth replicates like crazy and the only recourse is collecting and burning fallen leaves every year. Luckily it looks worse than it is for the trees, they loose their leaves in August, but by then most of a years photosynthesis is done ( just losing like 17%) Anyhow American chestnuts are bad hosts for the moths,…
Horse chestnuts and chestnuts are different genera, though both have "American" and "European" species. The American horse chestnut is often called the "buckeye". The nuts are vaguely reminiscent of each other, but the horse chestnuts and real chestnuts aren't closely related.
This may seem pedantic, but it's sort of important, as real chestnuts are edible (and delicious), while horse chestnuts are toxic to human beings.