I grow marijuana and chillies from time to time. I got good at it. I will say that plants are malleable in untold ways and so I find this article to be unsurprising.
Plants will do what they need to do in the end. I've done stuff like co2 bombing, and increasing nutrients to the point to where I get a whole new ecosystem of insects and an entirely new situation.
It is such fascinating stuff that it's actually the life I want to live. I'm a computer scientist but now I yearn for the botanical sciences.
I highly recommend checking out defoliation strategies and low-stress training methods for anyone interested. Plants are not dumb creatures. The results you can get from them are astonishing and the science of what plants actually are becomes more profound by the day.
"The placard recorded that the Nooksack tree produced 96,345 board feet (227.348 cubic meters) of the "finest quality" lumber.
The New York Times regarded the tree in a March 7, 1897 issue as the "most magnificent fir tree ever beheld by human eyes" and called its destruction a "truly pitiable tale" and a "crime".
The Morning Times of February 28, 1897 claimed that the wood, sawed into one-inch strips, would reach from "Whatcom [the tree's location] to China"."
to be fair, without humans there would be nobody to declare "barbarism". At one time, all humans were barbarians, it took a certain level of cultural development before the word "barbarism" was necessary, so at that point it was "new". It remains be be shown whether cultures that call other cultures "barbaric" are actually "better".
Barbarism was just the ethnic slang Greeks had for non Greeks that Romans then adopted for non Romans. But cultures playing “I’m the best” is not new nor did it require cultural development; othering is a natural part of game theory to make sure your tribe has tighter cohesion against intruders.
There are stories that the moss on trees in temperate rainforests allow the tree to pull water from their branches instead of the ground, increasing their max height.
For a while there were people poaching the moss that facilitated this, which is a problem because it grows only inches per year.
Not that it really matters, but the article also refers to it as “drawing water to the top”. That seems more representative of reality than “pumping water from the bottom”.
If you think of it that way, you have a real problem. It only takes about 10 meters for the weight of a column of water to create enough downward force that it starts vaporizing, at which point no pumping action works. This is why any deep well has a submerged pump. You simply can't pull water upward further than that with negative pressure in the Earth's atmosphere. It must be pushed with positive pressure instead.
This is why the question is interesting. You can't just suck water to the top of a 60 meter tree. There must be some kind of positive-pressure pumping involved.
The trick for trees is capillaries, which change the equation. The 10 meter limit only applies to larger columns. With capillaries there's a high negative tension that allows evaporation from leaves to pull the xylem sap up 100 meters or more.
There's no free lunch here. The Sun drives the evaporation, and if the tree were in a closed system with no solar input, the humidity would eventually get high enough to stop it.
One of the things Susan Simard proved was that deep rooted trees that had found subterranean water continue pulling that water at full speed at night when transpiration is low, and that water finds its way into the fungal networks in the soil and into nearby plants.
Simard attributes intention to this, but osmosis is “fair”. It seeks to move water to where sugars are and sugars to where water is. So a plant giving up sugars will receive water, and one low on water will give up sugars in the process of equalization.
Do fungi contain pumps to maintain disequilibrium in this work? I could not say. But even when they first learned the trick of tapping roots the basic premise would have worked in a rudimentary fashion woth no further optimization.
I don't understand how osmosis enters into this? Capillary action is sufficient to explain water traveling up the roots to a point where it was removed. Evaporation from leaves is sufficient to explain removal during the day. You'd need some other explanation for extraction by fungi or etc at night.
As a largely unrelated aside, there will still be a chemical potential across a membrane that doesn't permit a solute to cross. So water can diffuse into a concentrated solution without the solute flowing backwards into the reservoir. Alternatively, small solutes can leave while larger solutes are retained. This is the basis of dialysis.
The 10 metre thing assumes you have a suction side which is 10 metres lower than the pump, or at least a suction that is long/low enough that it can’t meet the pump’s NPSHr (Net Positive Suction Head required).
In a tree the inlet to the “pump” is at the base of the tree. It’s not like there’s a pump sitting in the tree at 80 metres trying to suck water up from the ground, that would obviously fail. It’s more like a very long pump.
This line of reasoning has always cracked me up. The internal dialog acidentally out loud at the least flattering moment. I believe the correct response to be:
The tree is a perpetual motion machine hooked up directly to the wheelworks of nature! It PUMPS 500 liters per day usibg Wind, solar, capilar action and evaporation! How do i charge my car with this?
That analysis only applies to a single discreet pump. A line of pumps in series does not suffer from that problem and that is roughly what a biological system would be expected to consist of.
There are no pumps in a tree, in series or not. There’s nothing between the roots and leaves that actively drives water upward in any way. The xylem is literally dead tissue.
Please notice that the comment I was responding to there made claims of physical infeasibility that I was responding to. I was not expressing any claims regarding actual concrete trees that you could go and visit.
More generally you seem to be dismissing out of hand the primary topic of discussion which is neither constructive nor enlightening.
Yeah, that "extreme low pressure" part of the article had me scratching my head. Even a complete vacuum at the top will not suck water up more than 10 meters! The author was probably oversimplifying for a lay audience.
the research is relevant to the issue of transpiration column hieght as a postulated limitation to overall hieght of any tree.
a column of water is pulled by hydrogen bonding between molecules in a tug of war fashion, the top of the column is where water is dissociated from the column at such a rate as to maintain low pressure with respect to the column[xylem]
in summary water moves from bottom to top in a transpiration stream, that ultimately ejects water vapour from the leaves, resulting in a low efficiency mechanism, that loses a lot of the water but occurs at such a rate that the low efficiency is "good enough" for whats needed.
> a transpiration stream, that ultimately ejects water vapour from the leaves
I don't believe this is correct, or rather is not a required component of the system but rather incidental. The chemical system within the leaf removes water via chemical reaction. There is a respiration process to dispose of waste gasses. Water vapor happens to be lost to this process not of necessity but rather because keeping it separate is quite difficult (ie requires significant complexity and additional energy expenditure). I expect that many desert adapted species approach perfection (but have not bothered to verify).
Maybe it's not more trouble pumping, eh, sucking water up. But that the top branches are the last ones to get water in periods of draught, and have therefore more resilience?
This goes against all previous research/measurements for actually tall trees (looks like they only considered up to 80m) and the fact that there are exactly zeros trees in the world taller than 130 meters [1]. Wide capillaries at the base, like stated in the article, don't seem to be related.
I agree it doesn't pass the sniff test (where are the 500 meter trees in the rainforests?) but I think it would make an excellent goal for molecularbiological and genetic engineering. We (our civilization) need to become much more skilled at that before we start editing the human germline, and we will inevitably want to edit the human germline eventually (or rather we are currently exhibiting great restraint in not doing so but I'm not sure how much longer that will last), and anyway thousand meter trees just sound like they would be really cool.
Sounds cool but for such experimentation you would want relatively fast experimental iterations to get anywhere, and this would take literal ages. You can play around with growth speed of course but that’s a different question and might be in some ways opposed to achieving height.
I don't think so. You don't have to reach the height limit just to iteratively develop the initial implementation of the pump system. A system that actively moves water would push it out the top so you've got an observable phenomenon to work with.
Which would also serve as reasonable challenges for genetic and molecularbiological engineering so ... what's your point?
Or do you mean to suggest that the failure of any accepted tree height records to surpass the maximum capillary distance can be explained by some other factor? (Based on your other comment it seems safe to assume that isn't what you meant but anyhow.) That seems far too convenient given that the observed cutoff is within the expected range.
Similarly, it blows my mind that all trees are made of air, specifically the carbon in it. I used to think that the biomass must come from the soil, but reality is more interesting.
There’s also a theory that the moss on these trees is mutualism instead of simply epiphytic. The moss holds moisture, which can be accessed by the tree.
While admittedly contested and only reproduced by a few labs outside Gerald Pollack's at University of Washington, there is a solid case that it could play a role in transporting water and sap to the tops of trees. At least, it's involved in the motion induced in hydrophilic tubes when there is sufficient ambient radiant energy (uv/infrared).
Schurr, J.M. (2013). Phenomena associated with gel–water interfaces: analyses and alternatives to the long-range ordered water hypothesis. J. Phys. Chem. B, 117(25), 7653–7674. https://doi.org/10.1021/jp302589y
Elton, D.C., Spencer, P.D., Riches, J.D. & Williams, E.D. (2020). Exclusion zone phenomena in water — a critical review of experimental findings and theories. Int. J. Mol. Sci., 21(14), 5041. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21145041 (open access; the most thorough critical review)
Elton, D.C. & Spencer, P.D. (2021). Pathological water science — four examples and what they have in common. In Water in Biomechanical and Related Systems (Biologically-Inspired Systems, vol. 17), pp. 155–170. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67227-0_8 (preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.07287)
I regretably didnt save it but there was a truly hilarious topic on usenet sci.physics long long ago. If we've gathered enough evidence against something or if the thing goes against accepted consensus you are forbidden from doing further research and new evidence is no longer allowed. The topic then invited others to list such topics. The list grew to hundreds of entries and people couldnt resist getting angry reading their personal trigger words despite there being many more silly things on it.
Be careful with that dismissal. The concept of an exclusion zone itself appears to be legitimate. More generally, there's lots of strange and surprising effects that crop up on the molecular level at interfaces in solution. However not all mechanistic explanations for such behavior are shall we say "widely accepted".
And then there's homeopathy which is a largely unrelated and entirely nonsensical thing.
Plants will do what they need to do in the end. I've done stuff like co2 bombing, and increasing nutrients to the point to where I get a whole new ecosystem of insects and an entirely new situation.
It is such fascinating stuff that it's actually the life I want to live. I'm a computer scientist but now I yearn for the botanical sciences.
I highly recommend checking out defoliation strategies and low-stress training methods for anyone interested. Plants are not dumb creatures. The results you can get from them are astonishing and the science of what plants actually are becomes more profound by the day.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSch_NgZpQs
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pHJIhxZEoxg
Too bad we cut it down, along with almost every other giant Douglas-fir.
"The placard recorded that the Nooksack tree produced 96,345 board feet (227.348 cubic meters) of the "finest quality" lumber.
The New York Times regarded the tree in a March 7, 1897 issue as the "most magnificent fir tree ever beheld by human eyes" and called its destruction a "truly pitiable tale" and a "crime".
The Morning Times of February 28, 1897 claimed that the wood, sawed into one-inch strips, would reach from "Whatcom [the tree's location] to China"."
to be fair, without humans there would be nobody to declare "barbarism". At one time, all humans were barbarians, it took a certain level of cultural development before the word "barbarism" was necessary, so at that point it was "new". It remains be be shown whether cultures that call other cultures "barbaric" are actually "better".
For a while there were people poaching the moss that facilitated this, which is a problem because it grows only inches per year.
Hm, may be because they are not really "pumping" the water?
This is why the question is interesting. You can't just suck water to the top of a 60 meter tree. There must be some kind of positive-pressure pumping involved.
There's no free lunch here. The Sun drives the evaporation, and if the tree were in a closed system with no solar input, the humidity would eventually get high enough to stop it.
Simard attributes intention to this, but osmosis is “fair”. It seeks to move water to where sugars are and sugars to where water is. So a plant giving up sugars will receive water, and one low on water will give up sugars in the process of equalization.
Do fungi contain pumps to maintain disequilibrium in this work? I could not say. But even when they first learned the trick of tapping roots the basic premise would have worked in a rudimentary fashion woth no further optimization.
As a largely unrelated aside, there will still be a chemical potential across a membrane that doesn't permit a solute to cross. So water can diffuse into a concentrated solution without the solute flowing backwards into the reservoir. Alternatively, small solutes can leave while larger solutes are retained. This is the basis of dialysis.
In a tree the inlet to the “pump” is at the base of the tree. It’s not like there’s a pump sitting in the tree at 80 metres trying to suck water up from the ground, that would obviously fail. It’s more like a very long pump.
... that would be the least of the tree's problems.
The tree is a perpetual motion machine hooked up directly to the wheelworks of nature! It PUMPS 500 liters per day usibg Wind, solar, capilar action and evaporation! How do i charge my car with this?
More generally you seem to be dismissing out of hand the primary topic of discussion which is neither constructive nor enlightening.
Or the high pressure is down here, whichever way you want to look at it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylem#Cohesion-tension_theory
a column of water is pulled by hydrogen bonding between molecules in a tug of war fashion, the top of the column is where water is dissociated from the column at such a rate as to maintain low pressure with respect to the column[xylem]
in summary water moves from bottom to top in a transpiration stream, that ultimately ejects water vapour from the leaves, resulting in a low efficiency mechanism, that loses a lot of the water but occurs at such a rate that the low efficiency is "good enough" for whats needed.
I don't believe this is correct, or rather is not a required component of the system but rather incidental. The chemical system within the leaf removes water via chemical reaction. There is a respiration process to dispose of waste gasses. Water vapor happens to be lost to this process not of necessity but rather because keeping it separate is quite difficult (ie requires significant complexity and additional energy expenditure). I expect that many desert adapted species approach perfection (but have not bothered to verify).
So sucking / pulling?
> leaves which have adapted to withstand greater water stress before wilting.
That must be one of the "adjustments to water transport" mentioned. So I suggest that they do, in fact, have trouble pumping water to top branches.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/REDWOODS-How-tall-can...
Or do you mean to suggest that the failure of any accepted tree height records to surpass the maximum capillary distance can be explained by some other factor? (Based on your other comment it seems safe to assume that isn't what you meant but anyhow.) That seems far too convenient given that the observed cutoff is within the expected range.
500ft is taller than the max ever, not 1640 ft
Coalescence of coastal fog accounts for a considerable part of the trees' water needs.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens#Fog_and_f...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens
Weirder still is the realization that all the air is just trapped light.
[1] https://www.sfgate.com/science/article/REDWOODS-How-tall-can...
While admittedly contested and only reproduced by a few labs outside Gerald Pollack's at University of Washington, there is a solid case that it could play a role in transporting water and sap to the tops of trees. At least, it's involved in the motion induced in hydrophilic tubes when there is sufficient ambient radiant energy (uv/infrared).
Relevant papers:
"Exclusion-zone water inside and outside of plant xylem vessels." 2024 Scientific Reports. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-62983-3
"Surface-induced flow: a natural microscopic engine using infrared energy as fuel." 202 Science Advances. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aba0941
"Long-range forces extending from polymer-gel surfaces." 2003 Phys. Rev. E. https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.68.031408
Pollack's site: https://www.pollacklab.org/
Some critiques of Pollack's theory:
Schurr, J.M. (2013). Phenomena associated with gel–water interfaces: analyses and alternatives to the long-range ordered water hypothesis. J. Phys. Chem. B, 117(25), 7653–7674. https://doi.org/10.1021/jp302589y Elton, D.C., Spencer, P.D., Riches, J.D. & Williams, E.D. (2020). Exclusion zone phenomena in water — a critical review of experimental findings and theories. Int. J. Mol. Sci., 21(14), 5041. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21145041 (open access; the most thorough critical review) Elton, D.C. & Spencer, P.D. (2021). Pathological water science — four examples and what they have in common. In Water in Biomechanical and Related Systems (Biologically-Inspired Systems, vol. 17), pp. 155–170. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67227-0_8 (preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.07287)
Yours shall be filed under homeopathy :)
And then there's homeopathy which is a largely unrelated and entirely nonsensical thing.