Environment

World’s Oldest Organism is Dying

Pando, the world's largest living organism — and possibly its oldest — is being destroyed by the voracious appetite of mule deer.

Pando is a colony of quaking aspen that spans 106 acres (43 hectares) of south-central Utah. Because of an explosion of mule deer in the area, new sprouts from Pando are eaten before they have a chance to mature, and the venerable organism is at risk of dying out altogether.

Though Pando has often been called the oldest living organism (with some estimates claiming the stand is upward of 80,000 years old), dating techniques for the colony are so imprecise that no one can say for sure how old the grove is.

To the casual observer, Pando looks like an ordinary forest. But each tree shares a common root system and is a genetically identical clone of its forest pals. It's essentially a forest of one tree.

Mule deer, and occasionally cattle, are devouring the babies of the community before they have an opportunity to grow to maturity. The problem has been going on for decades. Every sprout that comes up — they're technically called suckers — is eaten almost immediately as it comes out of the ground. Meanwhile, the older stems are almost all between 110 and 130 years old, which is about the typical life span of individual quaking aspen stems. The forest floor is covered with dead trees, and no new life is coming in to replace it.