At Age 4,600-Plus, Methuselah Pine Tree Begets New Offspring
June 17, 2003
By GWEN KINKEAD
A tree known as Methuselah, famed as the oldest in the
world, has just produced evidence that life begins at
5,000, give or take a few years.
Today that evidence - a dozen baby bristlecone pine trees -
are about nine inches long with green, bushy tops and long
healthy roots.
A mere sprout itself when the pyramids of Egypt were being
built, Methuselah clings to a dry windswept mountaintop in
the Inyo National Forest of east-central California.
Last fall, there in the White Mountains, nearly two miles
above sea level, a tree farmer named Jared Milarch
harvested cuttings and pine cones from Methuselah with
special permission from the United States Forest Service,
which normally keeps the tree's location secret. After
failing in an attempt to clone the tree, he planted seeds
from the cones in a growing medium and, much to everyone's
surprise, they sprouted.
Next month, a ceremony is being planned to recognize the
new offspring, and one will be presented to the United
States Botanic Garden on the grounds of the Capitol.
Experts are unsure whether Methuselah has borne any
offspring in its native setting, a 28,000-acre preserve
called the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest. Very few seeds
of the eerie small trees, some sculptured by the wind into
fantastic bows and knots and waves, survive in that harsh
environment. But with the help of humans, Methuselah is
known to have reproduced itself at least one other time, in
the 1970's.
"It had a 100 percent germination rate," said Le Roy
Johnson, former director of the Institute of Tree Genetics
in Placerville, Calif., who led the earlier effort. "That's
more than we get on most trees, let alone the oldest tree
in the world." Animals and plants lose their ability to
reproduce as they age.
Bristlecone pines seem "capable of growing forever" in the
mountains, Mr. Johnson said.
The baby Methuselah will have tight security when it is
exhibited at the Botanic Garden this fall, for fear of
theft, said the garden's executive director, Holly Shimizu.
"These pines are very famous," she said. "We have all read
about Methuselah and heard about it, but so few people
actually get to see it."
When it was shown to the public for the first time in
Virginia recently, people lined up to be photographed with
it, said Mr. Milarch, co-founder of the Champion Tree
Project, a group dedicated to cloning the champions of
America's 800-plus tree species for reforestation.
Bristlecone pines have both male and female cones and can
self-pollinate, but when that occurs, the offspring are
usually faulty. Most likely, the father was a neighbor
whose pollen was carried by the wind or an insect. Genetic
tests will confirm the seedling's lineage.
"The scientific value of one specimen like this is small,"
said Christine Flanagan, public program director at the
Botanic Garden, but it can be "a signpost for other
studies."
By taking samples from the young seedlings, researchers
will be able to look for genetic changes associated with
that environment that might account for the tree's great
age, she said.
In trees, unlike in humans, stress fosters longevity.
Methuselah grows in rocky, alkaline, nutrient-poor soil and
is buried under snow most of the year and blasted by sun
and parched for water for the rest. It has a growing season
of just two months in the summer to produce and store food
for the winter. Yet bristlecones have thrived in that spot
for 11,000 years, tree ring analysis shows.
They retain their bottlebrush needles up to 40 years, four
times as long as other pines, so they need fewer nutrients
each year for new growth. Also, their living tissue is just
a strip, in Methuselah's case, one inch thick and six wide.
Their trunks start dying around 1,000 years. What's left,
their crowns and the strip of vascular tissue, grows
extremely slowly - one-hundredth of an inch in a good year,
said Mr. Johnson, and often less. Giant sequoias, some of
them 2,000 years old, grow an inch in diameter in a good
year.
Experts think the shrinking of bristlecones' live tissue is
a strategy to balance growth with available nutrients. But
it may contribute to their longevity in another way as
well: bristlecones that grow faster in lusher conditions
are more susceptible to pathogens, said Tom Harlan, a
dendrochronologist who is a consultant to the University of
Arizona's Laboratory of Tree Ring Research. The
laboratory's senior scientist, Dr. Edmund Schulman,
discovered Methuselah in 1957 and estimated its age at
about 4,600 years. (The current Forest Service estimate is
4,733.)
Only abrupt climate change and pathogens attacking exposed
roots kill ancient bristlecones, said John Louth, Forest
Service manager of their preserve. For example, the
seedlings of Methuselah propagated in the 1970's all died
when passed out to arboretums at sea level.
Methuselah's new sprout will not survive in Washington,
predicted the National Arboretum's director, Dr. Thomas
Elias. "If the aim is to establish it in an arboretum,
high-altitude ones like Denver are more suitable," he said.
As for Methuselah, it may need its new status as world's
oldest mother to hang on to its place in the record books.
Researchers are looking right now in the mountains of China
and Russia for older trees. And in fact, researchers
connected with the Arizona lab say that a recent analysis
of a tree boring collected years ago by Dr. Schulman
indicates that one of Methuselah's neighbors is even older.
But out of concern for that tree's safety, they are not
disclosing anything more about it.
www.nytimes.com/2003/06/17/science/17TREE.html?ex=1056952527&ei=1&en=ffa6c703db72accd (some pics)
