Talk:Great Basin Bristlecone Pine

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[edit] Age

The referenced article says "Although a single tree trunk can become at most about 600 years old, the spruces had survived by pushing out another trunk as soon as the old one died...." This sounds like a colony-type plant like Pando. The Bristlecone pine trunks are assayed to 4000+ yrs age. Dan Watts (talk) 19:42, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm not a botanist, but it doesn't strike me as quite the same thing as Pando. The oldest root has itself been dated to about 8000 years old. I would call a root a part of an individual organism, even if the trunks are more temporary. What defines a tree? Granted, the trunk is what we supra-surface organisms notice most of the time, but isn't a root an important part of a tree? And so wouldn't a root that has been growing and maturing for 8000 years represent a single organism rather than a colony? In the case of Pando, by contrast, I don't think anyone's claiming that any given root has persisted for thousands of years. I tried to get at the difference in my revision by means of the word individual to honor the trunk-centric human conception of trees. Jbening (talk) 01:11, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

O.K., that sounds convincing. I will not challenge that again. Dan Watts (talk) 01:26, 14 April 2008 (UTC)