Pando update: Threatened Utah aspen grove has ‘come a long way’
Utah is home to one of the world’s largest organisms. It takes up about 106 acres and likely weighs more than 13 million pounds. But you could drive right past it and not know it was there. Because “Pando” doesn’t look like one living being — it looks like tens of thousands of individual trees. While the quaking aspen colony doesn’t all share the same roots, said Karen Mock, department head of Utah State University’s Quinney College of Natural Resources, each tree shares the same genetics. Together, the stand has been regenerating itself in what Utahns now call Fishlake National Forest for thousands of years. Mock and a team of scientists only discovered it was a single organism in 2008.
Related article:
