The baobab tree is one of nature ’s weirder creations . With its branches high up overhead like a set of upside down roots , it look like it was pull directly from a Dr. Seuss book . But something even weirder is happening inside .
Afterchecking out this photograph of a baobabin Madagascar , a Kinja - discourse kvetch off with commenters speculate on the hollow trunk of the trees and wondering 1 ) where their strange physiology came from and 2 ) just how you could possibly know how previous they were :
https://gizmodo.com/these-ancient-trees-look-as-though-they-belong-in-an-al-1706991783
Srynerson
I ’ve always wondered how it is that baobab tree diagram manage to generate sufficient Department of Energy to sustain their massive size of it despite the comparatively lilliputian square country of their leaves .
Onyxys
They ’re basically vacuous at bottom . Much of the living cellular biomass of a tree lies only within the tabu few layers of ring just under the bark – but I ’m not even trusted that Baobab tree even have rings due to the hollowness in the centre – which means that the great unwashed ca n’t really severalise their age , at least not by hoop reckoning .
Ask and you shall receive , Kinja .
Even without resort to hoop - enumeration , there ’s a better even more dependable method acting of project out the eld of an individual baobab . I ’m talking about carbon 14 dating , which has commit several of the trees in the thousand - year asset compass — and given us a clew about just where the hollowing out consequence comes from .
Astudy published in PLOS One by a teamof research worker lead by Adrian Patrut out of Babeş - Bolyai University took multiple samples from all over several hollowed - out baobabs and found something surprising when they dated them : The age of the samples did n’t follow a normal convention . Instead , they would see a pattern in aging , only to see it reverse a piffling afterwards , which made the researchers say that when we see a baobab we ’re not just seeing one tree ; we ’re really seeing many :
The age time value exhibit a uninterrupted increase from the cavity walls up to a certain distance into the wood , after which they decrease toward the outer part . The only explanation for this anomaly , which represents a reproducible experimental determination , is that such internal enclosed space are in fact natural empty spaces between fused stems dispose in a closed pack - work social organization . We name them false tooth decay .
Image : Baobabs in Madagascar /plizzba
biological science
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