“Pando”, which means “I extend” in Latin, is the largest and one of the oldest living organisms that exist on Earth today. Is about an ancient forest that is made up of a single tree, a poplar.
How is it possible that a forest is made of a single tree? It turns out that Pando, which is about 12,000 years old, has 47,000 stems They have exactly the same DNA.
The stems of this ancient living structure, They connect through their roots that span about 40 hectares in a wooded area in Utah, USA. Likewise, he is known as “The Trembling Giant.”
This poplar, whose stems reach 24 meters, as if they were independent trees, it weighs about 6,000 metric tonsmaking it the largest living organism in the world in terms of mass.
The haunting sound of the largest living organism on Earth
According to Science Alert, the project that today allows us to listen to Pando arose from the organization Friends Of Pando, which is responsible for monitoring this enormous organism and also educating about it.
There, the sound artist, Jeff Rice did an experiment placing a hydrophonewhich is a device that captures sound waves in water and converts them into electrical signals, in a hollow in the poplar tree toward its roots.
“Hydrophones don’t just need water to work. They can also pick up vibrations from surfaces like roots, and when I put on the headphones, I was instantly shocked. Something was happening. A faint sound was heard,” Rice commented when they presented the project in 2023.
The expert suggests that The sound captured by the hydrophone is the vibrations produced by the movements of the tree.like leaves moving with the wind, which emit vibrations through the stems that descend to the roots.
Likewise, they experimented by hitting a branch at one end, and then checking that the vibration traveled through the roots of the stems. And they also managed to capture sounds during a storm.
“The sounds are beautiful and interesting, but From a practical point of view, natural sounds can be used to document the health of an environment. “They are a record of local biodiversity and provide a baseline that can be measured against environmental change,” Rice added.
You can listen to the sound here:
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