Pando, meaning “I spread”, also known as The Trembling Giant, is a massive organism of clonal trees, quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) specifically. Although it looks like a stand of many separate trees, it is actually a single entity bound by an enormous root structure. Located in Utah, Pando is currently the heaviest known organism on planet Earth, though not the largest by area covered. Pando weighs around 6,600 tons and covers an area of roughly 108 acres. There is a huge fungal colony in Oregon that covers around 2,384 acres, surpassing Pando for area quite significantly, but not by weight.
What an awesome being! Many of us learn in school that the blue whale is the biggest creature on the planet. Once we open our mind to what life can truly encompass, we find that this is far from the truth. In fact, it is hypothesized by numerous brilliant minds that organisms like Pando and the great honey mushroom fungus of Oregon are actually not all that rare. You can walk among the trees and not realize that you are surrounded entirely by a single being and you can walk for thousands of acres over a mycelial network that you can’t even see!
Pando is made up of around 47,000 trees, each genetically identical, and sharing the same root system. Quaking aspens mostly reproduce asexually by sprouting from the same root network. Many other plants rely on flowers and pollination to produce fruit and their resulting seeds. Some of the trees here are over 130 years old. The age of Pando as a whole is harder to determine, but some guesses place it between 16,000 and 1 million years old!
Jerry Kemperman and Burton Barnes are given credit for discovering Pando in 1976. Later, in 1992, Michael Grant, Jeffrey Mitton, and Yan Linhart of the University of Colorado at Boulder examined the stand, named it Pando, and claimed that it was the world’s largest organism by weight. Since Pando’s modern discovery and identification, it was noted that the stand was not growing as well over the years. Herbivores had been eating or trampling much of the new growth. Cattle, elk, and deer were the main culprits. Since this discovery, several plans have been enacted which are showing some promise. A small portion was fenced off and the resulting new growth is significant. Other actions, such as burning, clearing, and cutting, have shown some successful results too.
While Pando may be the most well-known and possibly the heaviest of these great organisms, there are many other examples of similar tree stands and fungal networks. Only by broadening our definitions and opening our minds will we truly discover the awe of life encompassed on our small home in this vast universe.