Pando

Yes, the six thousand six hundred ton giant.

If you are wondering what kind of organism covers a hundred and seven acres and has lived for eighty thousand years, allow me to introduce you to Pando.

Pando, often referred to as the trembling giant.

That's the one.

It's located in the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, and if you walk into this forest, you will see what looks like roughly forty-five thousand individual quaking aspen trees.

Those forty-five thousand trees are all genetically identical clones.

And more importantly, beneath the soil, they're all physically connected by a single massive shared root system.

Pando is not a forest.

...

the biggest giant sequoia or Pando, which would be kind of the same, but that's just individual stems from one root system.

Oh.

This is o- one, one full canopy with a gigantic root system, but it's all above ground.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, which, yeah, yeah.

Well, we'll have to talk about that in relation to Pando, but that's not the objective of our podcast today.

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A single aspen clone can cover many acres and consist of tens of thousands of individual stems, all connected by a shared root system.

The largest known aspen clone is called Pando, located in Utah's Fish Lake National Forest.

It covers about 106 acres and is estimated to weigh about 13 million pounds, making it one of the heaviest known organisms on Earth.

Pando is estimated to be thousands of years old, though the individual stems that make up the visible forest above ground live only about 100 to 150 years each.

When Pando changes colour in autumn, the entire grove turns golden at nearly the same time because all the stems share the same genetic programming for when to begin senescence.

Scientists studying Pando have raised concerns about its health.

Overgrazing by deer and elk has reduced the number of young stems replacing old ones, and the clone may be slowly shrinking.

In Northern Europe, birch trees are among the most important sources of autumn colour.

So it's like one organism spreads over these giant areas.

Utah has the largest one down in central Utah near Fish Lake called, they call it Pando.

And it's just thousands and thousands of acres of fish.

Aspen trees everywhere in it, and they all share the same root system.

And the newsletter introduces this concept using a metaphor from the natural world that honestly it completely rewired how I view financial resilience.

So we're going to Central Utah, uh, to look at this very specific biological phenomenon called Pando.

Pando is just fascinating.

It completely breaks our fundamental understanding of what an individual actually is.

If you, um, if you walk through the Fishlake National Forest in Utah, you see what just looks like a sprawling, totally normal forest of quaking aspens.

But the visual is a total deception, right?

Yeah.

Because Pando isn't actually a forest at all.