S3E15: The Surprising Longevity of Desert Plants

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast is made possible by financial.

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0:00:07 - (Chris Clarke): Out nine 0 mile from needles.com.

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0:00:17 - (Chris Clarke): Imagine we found a country the size.

0:00:19 - (Chris Clarke): Of France that was covered in ancient.

0:00:21 - (Chris Clarke): Forest, where trees a century old were mere saplings, just getting started in life, where the oldest trees sprouted when near mythical monsters roamed the landscape.

0:00:29 - (Chris Clarke): Imagine visiting this country, standing outside in.

0:00:34 - (Chris Clarke): One spot or another and watching. Maybe you've left your cabin on an errand.

0:00:38 - (Chris Clarke): Maybe you just went out to get some air.

0:00:40 - (Chris Clarke): You walk half a block from the place you're staying, caught up in one seemingly important thought or another, and you.

0:00:46 - (Chris Clarke): Suddenly realize that within your field of.

0:00:50 - (Chris Clarke): Vision, you see three trees that are.

0:00:52 - (Chris Clarke): Each more than a thousand years old. You turn your head and you see two more. You continue to walk, seeing the open.

0:01:02 - (Chris Clarke): Park like forest with new eyes, the.

0:01:04 - (Chris Clarke): Unimaginable ancientness of it. Everywhere you look, trees that are 700 years old, a thousand years old, 3000 years old.

0:01:15 - (Chris Clarke): You wreck your brain for half remembered scraps of human history. Huh, let's see. That tree probably sprouted before the buddha was born.

0:01:24 - (Chris Clarke): And that one over there probably germinated when Homer had the iliad in first draft.

0:01:32 - (Chris Clarke): Every now and then you find a tree that likely began life before the bronze age.

0:01:36 - (Chris Clarke): And while you're imagining all this, imagine.

0:01:40 - (Chris Clarke): Further that as you really see these ancient trees for the first time, you remember hearing about 100 different plans to.

0:01:46 - (Chris Clarke): Cut them all down. Not because the timber is valuable, not because people need centuries old firewood, but.

0:01:55 - (Chris Clarke): Just because people have deemed this incredibly ancient forest worthless. They've decided that the land the forest occupies could be better used for other things.

0:02:05 - (Chris Clarke): And so they plan to bulldoze it.

0:02:08 - (Chris Clarke): Stack the trees in big debris piles to rot, and build their far more.

0:02:12 - (Chris Clarke): Important parking lots or garbage dumps or strip malls. This country, this forest, they actually exist. I live here, of course. The trees rarely exceed 10ft in height.

0:02:30 - (Chris Clarke): Many of them are well known to science, the Mojave yucca, the diamond cholla, the buckhorn cholla, Mormon tea.

0:02:36 - (Chris Clarke): But mostly, and almost everywhere you look below 5000ft in the Mojave Desert, the sonoran desert, the chihuahuan desert is creosote.

0:02:46 - (Chris Clarke): The oldest known creosote bush, at least the one whose age is public knowledge.

0:02:52 - (Chris Clarke): Is about 40 miles from my house.

0:02:54 - (Chris Clarke): And it's a bit more than 11,700 years old, according to the estimates. To the untrained eye, it looks like a ring of seemingly independent and frankly, not very impressive shrubs.

0:03:05 - (Chris Clarke): But 11,000 years ago, more or less.

0:03:10 - (Chris Clarke): A single creosote seed germinated.

0:03:12 - (Chris Clarke): It grew, it made leaves, and eventually.

0:03:15 - (Chris Clarke): Made stems, which made more leaves and flowers and fruit.

0:03:19 - (Chris Clarke): And every once in a while, the stems right where they emerged from the.

0:03:24 - (Chris Clarke): Roots just below the soil level, would.

0:03:26 - (Chris Clarke): Grow side offshoots that would emerge right next to the stem, and those new.

0:03:33 - (Chris Clarke): Shoots would grow into new stems, which would themselves grow new offshoots. The clump expanded, and after another century or five, the oldest stems in the center of the clump began to die, leaving a widening hole in the center of the creosote.

0:03:50 - (Chris Clarke): That 11,700 year old creosote, which for.

0:03:54 - (Chris Clarke): A tiny fraction of its life has been known familiarly as King Clone, which my former co host and I visited in episode one of season two of.

0:04:03 - (Chris Clarke): This podcast, expanded outward across the mojave landscape, across the millennia, at an average.

0:04:08 - (Chris Clarke): Rate of three quarters of a millimeter per year. King Clone is not unique. It's probably not the only creosote that's that old. There may well be others scientists know about where they've decided to keep the location secret for fear of vandalism. But extreme old age aside, I can.

0:04:22 - (Chris Clarke): Tell you this much.

0:04:23 - (Chris Clarke): When I walk around my neighborhood, I pass within stone throwing distance of two or three dozen smaller rings, some of.

0:04:29 - (Chris Clarke): Them 12ft across, at the soil level. If you do the math, and you.

0:04:34 - (Chris Clarke): Use a much more conservative millimeter per year rather than three quarters, just to defend against charges of hyperbole, that works out to 300 years of age for every foot in width measured where the.

0:04:44 - (Chris Clarke): Stems come out of the ground.

0:04:47 - (Chris Clarke): Creosotes that are older than 500 years.

0:04:49 - (Chris Clarke): Are as common as dirt where I live. And actually, I mean that literally. Just about the only humus you'll find.

0:04:55 - (Chris Clarke): In this part of the desert gathers at the base of those creosote clumps. When you see plans to develop the.

0:05:01 - (Chris Clarke): Desert for one project or another, if.

0:05:04 - (Chris Clarke): Creosote is mentioned, it's only to identify the kind of habitat it dominates.

0:05:09 - (Chris Clarke): It's not a special status species, it's barely a regular status species. Creosote is ubiquitous in the desert, and.

0:05:18 - (Chris Clarke): Metaphorically speaking, environmentalists often peer through the creosote branches, hoping to see something interesting.

0:05:24 - (Chris Clarke): On the other side. I increasingly find creosote fascinating for its own sake.

0:05:31 - (Chris Clarke): Ive seen creosote clonal rings 1500 years old on the footprints of proposed desert.

0:05:36 - (Chris Clarke): Solar facilities at the verges of dirt.

0:05:38 - (Chris Clarke): Roads and off road vehicle sacrifice areas. Ive seen millennia old creosotes festooned with discarded plastic bags in vacant lots next.

0:05:47 - (Chris Clarke): To chain drug stores.

0:05:50 - (Chris Clarke): They make up the only ancient forest ive ever heard of that no one.

0:05:54 - (Chris Clarke): Sees, even though they look square at it.

0:05:57 - (Chris Clarke): I see it lately and it tears my heart.

0:06:03 - (Chris Clarke): And once you see it, it cannot be unseen.

0:06:15 - (Joe Geoffrey): Think the deserts are barren wastelands? Think again. It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast.

0:06:35 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you Joe, and welcome to yet another episode of 90 Miles from the Desert Protection podcast. I'm your host, Chris Clarke, and today.

0:06:43 - (Chris Clarke): We are talking about very old plants in the desert. We started off with a story about.

0:06:49 - (Chris Clarke): Creosote, the ancient plant that people are.

0:06:51 - (Chris Clarke): Most likely to have heard about with.

0:06:53 - (Chris Clarke): Regard to its occasional impressive age.

0:06:56 - (Chris Clarke): And this topic, to be honest, came.

0:06:58 - (Chris Clarke): To mind because of an honest mistake.

0:07:00 - (Chris Clarke): I saw in a piece written by.

0:07:02 - (Chris Clarke): Someone I admire greatly. It wasn't a huge mistake, it didn't undermine the piece, and I know pretty.

0:07:07 - (Chris Clarke): Much how the mistake was made, because a lot of people have made it.

0:07:10 - (Chris Clarke): There are sources out in the world that if you're not familiar with a topic to the point where you are constantly immersed in the veracity of different.

0:07:17 - (Chris Clarke): Sources, if you don't check those sources.

0:07:20 - (Chris Clarke): Really, really thoroughly, you might think they're.

0:07:22 - (Chris Clarke): Reputable, whereas what they're actually doing is just repeating folklore that they heard somewhere else, and it gets copied and pasted.

0:07:31 - (Chris Clarke): And copied and pasted.

0:07:33 - (Chris Clarke): And this was in a really good article about Joshua trees. The mistake was a throwaway line about how some Joshua trees can live for thousands of years. And in the strictest technical sense, that is not entirely false.

0:07:49 - (Chris Clarke): But it's not true in the way people would expect.

0:07:53 - (Chris Clarke): It's true only really in limited circumstances.

0:07:57 - (Chris Clarke): That we will touch on later in this episode. An individual stem of a Joshua tree has a life expectancy somewhere in the.

0:08:04 - (Chris Clarke): Neighborhood of 250 years. The trees are fragile. They break, they succumb to windstorms, they succumb to damage by small animals trying to get water in dry times. It's really common to drive through or walk through parts of the Mojave desert.

0:08:20 - (Chris Clarke): Where Joshua trees live and see trees.

0:08:22 - (Chris Clarke): That have fallen over and broken and shed limbs. At any rate, its accepted these days that only rare Joshua tree makes it.

0:08:34 - (Chris Clarke): Past 250 years old.

0:08:37 - (Chris Clarke): They grow pretty slowly compared to, lets.

0:08:40 - (Chris Clarke): Say the corn in your vegetable garden.

0:08:42 - (Chris Clarke): But for desert plants they grow pretty quickly. And plants that grow quickly tend to be short lived.

0:08:48 - (Chris Clarke): They tend to be fragile.

0:08:50 - (Chris Clarke): People that like desert trees, have long found it a little hard to tell precisely how old Joshua trees are.

0:08:57 - (Chris Clarke): There's a reason for this. Joshua trees are monocots. They're more closely related to grasses than.

0:09:02 - (Chris Clarke): They are to, say, pines and oaks.

0:09:04 - (Chris Clarke): Which means they don't have annual growth.

0:09:06 - (Chris Clarke): Rings, the kind that you see when you cut down or take a core sample of one of those pines or oaks and those trees, you see each.

0:09:14 - (Chris Clarke): Year'S growth recorded in a series of light and dark concentric rings in the.

0:09:18 - (Chris Clarke): Cross section of the trunk. And Joshua trees don't have that. You can't just cut them down and count the rings to see how many.

0:09:25 - (Chris Clarke): Years old they are, or were.

0:09:28 - (Chris Clarke): And so up until fairly recently, like in the last 30 years or so, we didn't have enough experience with Joshua trees, at least those of us immersed.

0:09:36 - (Chris Clarke): In the western science mindset.

0:09:38 - (Chris Clarke): Our experience didn't reach far back enough that we had a good idea of.

0:09:42 - (Chris Clarke): How long the things live. Settlers of european ancestry, after all, have.

0:09:46 - (Chris Clarke): Only been in the Mojave desert for a little bit less than one typical Joshua tree lifespan.

0:09:52 - (Chris Clarke): And in the absence of a really.

0:09:53 - (Chris Clarke): Obvious physical clue to the age of.

0:09:56 - (Chris Clarke): A plant, like those annual growth rings.

0:09:58 - (Chris Clarke): We'Re going to talk more about the.

0:09:59 - (Chris Clarke): Ways in which scientists have approached the.

0:10:01 - (Chris Clarke): Topic of seeing what kind of longevity desert plants can expect, and which plants are the surprising winners of that contest as far as life expectancy. But first, if you're a faithful listener.

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0:13:41 - (Chris Clarke): If you like what you see, share it around. Tell your friends word of mouth is really important. Okay, so how do you find out.

0:14:20 - (Chris Clarke): How old a desert plant is if.

0:14:22 - (Chris Clarke): You can't take a core sample and count the annual growth rings, either because those growth rings aren't there, as in.

0:14:28 - (Chris Clarke): The case of Joshua trees and saguaros.

0:14:30 - (Chris Clarke): And agaves and similar plants, or because the growth rings are not going to.

0:14:35 - (Chris Clarke): Tell the whole story.

0:14:36 - (Chris Clarke): I mean, sometimes bristlecone pines, for instance, have living tissue growing in just a strip down the trunk, and that strip may well move around a little bit, and most of the trunk will look dead, and there'll be a little thin.

0:14:49 - (Chris Clarke): Living strip of tissue. Counting the rings in that case may be a little trickier than you expect.

0:14:56 - (Chris Clarke): So how do you tell how old a plant is if you don't have those rings and you can't count on them?

0:15:01 - (Chris Clarke): It's not easy.

0:15:02 - (Chris Clarke): There are a couple of reasons for that. First off, I already mentioned the fact.

0:15:07 - (Chris Clarke): That western scientific observers have not been around in the deserts for more than.

0:15:11 - (Chris Clarke): 150 years or so. And so anything that's more than a couple centuries old needs to have been first noticed and then documented in a.

0:15:21 - (Chris Clarke): Way that people can find the documentation.

0:15:23 - (Chris Clarke): And see that the plant is still there.

0:15:26 - (Chris Clarke): There are ways you can do this.

0:15:28 - (Chris Clarke): A lot of the time, though, what scientists really want to find out is.

0:15:32 - (Chris Clarke): Not necessarily how old an individual plant is.

0:15:36 - (Chris Clarke): I mean, that's fascinating, but it's kind of a curiosity rather than an important scientific fact. What's more important to scientists is finding out how old plants like that can expect to get or how old they can get, even if most of them don't get that old. This has a lot more to do.

0:15:57 - (Chris Clarke): With how the desert works than the.

0:15:59 - (Chris Clarke): Lifespan of an individual plant. And so we'll be talking both about.

0:16:04 - (Chris Clarke): Finding the age of individual plants and.

0:16:06 - (Chris Clarke): Finding life expectancies of individual plant species in some places. And they're both really fascinating. We do have a study for each.

0:16:14 - (Chris Clarke): One of these examples. We'll take the individual plants one first.

0:16:18 - (Chris Clarke): There is a sort of objective way.

0:16:20 - (Chris Clarke): Of recording what was in the desert.

0:16:22 - (Chris Clarke): Historically that western settler type travelers did.

0:16:26 - (Chris Clarke): Take part in at the time, even though the people that did this documentation.

0:16:30 - (Chris Clarke): May not have intended to document the plants at all. And what I'm talking about is old photographs from the late 19th century, early.

0:16:37 - (Chris Clarke): 20Th century that are far enough back.

0:16:39 - (Chris Clarke): In time that we can get a real. Well, sorry about this, but we can get a real snapshot from these photographs.

0:16:47 - (Chris Clarke): Of the vegetation in the area at a known date.

0:16:49 - (Chris Clarke): And then we can go back and.

0:16:51 - (Chris Clarke): Either rephotograph the area or just examine it and find out that, for instance, an individual shrub or bunch grass or.

0:16:58 - (Chris Clarke): Tree or agave or cactus or whatever was there in 1860 and is still there in 2010. And that's a really good way of determining the age of the individual plants in the photos. And you can also extrapolate from that data to get a better sense of the expected lifespan of some of these plants.

0:17:20 - (Chris Clarke): I have a personal example of that.

0:17:22 - (Chris Clarke): Which I was tickled to find about a dozen years ago. I was going through a database of historic photos that were taken by a photographer named Burton Fraser in the 1920s and thirties.

0:17:33 - (Chris Clarke): Fraser was a professional photographer, and he.

0:17:35 - (Chris Clarke): Would take pictures of things, scenery, plants, animals, mines, trains, picturesque things from all around the west. He would print them up as postcards.

0:17:48 - (Chris Clarke): And sell them in souvenir places like Fred Harvey stores at train stations and.

0:17:52 - (Chris Clarke): Hotels and gas stations and diners and that kind of thing.

0:17:57 - (Chris Clarke): And there was a photo of his I found in this database that he.

0:18:00 - (Chris Clarke): Took in 1926 that I just, there was something, something nagging at the back.

0:18:07 - (Chris Clarke): Of my head about this photo. There was a Joshua tree in the.

0:18:09 - (Chris Clarke): Photo in Centennial Flat, just west of Panamint Valley and Deaths Valley.

0:18:14 - (Chris Clarke): There's just something about the way this.

0:18:16 - (Chris Clarke): Joshua tree was branching. It was youngish, it had maybe eight branches on it, but there was just.

0:18:24 - (Chris Clarke): Something about the way it was growing that looked really familiar.

0:18:28 - (Chris Clarke): On a hunch, I found a copy of a more recent photo of centennial flat by a professional photographer named Anton Corbin. He took a photo that happened to have a bunch of irish rock and.

0:18:40 - (Chris Clarke): Roll musicians standing around in front of Joshua trees.

0:18:43 - (Chris Clarke): And that album, the Joshua Tree by U two, has a photo of a.

0:18:49 - (Chris Clarke): Very distinctive Joshua tree in it that was much older looking, had a lot more branches, a lot more character to.

0:18:54 - (Chris Clarke): It, didn't look young and exuberant.

0:18:56 - (Chris Clarke): It looked ancient and venerable.

0:18:59 - (Chris Clarke): And despite that, it's pretty obvious it's the same tree. If you look at both photos, and I'll have them both in the show.

0:19:06 - (Chris Clarke): Notes, the Burton Fraser photo from 1926.

0:19:09 - (Chris Clarke): Is 54 years younger than the Anton.

0:19:12 - (Chris Clarke): Corbin U two Joshua tree.

0:19:14 - (Chris Clarke): Joshua Tree.

0:19:14 - (Chris Clarke): Which means that this sort of youthful, vigorous looking plant became a venerable looking plant in less than 60 years. That's a pretty human scale of time.

0:19:23 - (Chris Clarke): It's not bristlecone pine time. This is human time. And in fact, 20 years after Anton Corbin took that photo, that tree was.

0:19:31 - (Chris Clarke): Lying dead on the ground.

0:19:33 - (Chris Clarke): I have been to the spot a couple of times.

0:19:35 - (Chris Clarke): There's a plaque there that you two fans have mounted in the ground.

0:19:40 - (Chris Clarke): That's an example of an inadvertent rephotography experiment.

0:19:44 - (Chris Clarke): Wasn't deliberate.

0:19:47 - (Chris Clarke): For an example of a more deliberate study, let's take a look at one.

0:19:51 - (Chris Clarke): Done by Janice Bowers, Robert Webb, and Rene Rondeau, published in the Journal of Vegetation Science in 1995.

0:19:59 - (Chris Clarke): Between 1985 and 95, these scientists acquired 1500 ish photographs of the Grand Canyon area from a bunch of archives. There were 500 of them taken in 1889 and 1890, about 200 taken in 1923, and then some from the seventies and eighties.

0:20:21 - (Chris Clarke): This is a very methodical attempt to.

0:20:23 - (Chris Clarke): Locate older photographs and then find newer photographs or take them. During this study period, the scientists replicated.

0:20:32 - (Chris Clarke): Almost 1200 of the photographs, and they.

0:20:34 - (Chris Clarke): Looked at all of them and they.

0:20:35 - (Chris Clarke): Found photographs in which they could confidently.

0:20:38 - (Chris Clarke): Identify the shrubs in the photographs and compared older images with newer images. And I will spare you the methodology. Personally, I find it fascinating to listen to podcasts that are essentially spreadsheets of.

0:20:52 - (Chris Clarke): Plant latin names with numbers attached.

0:20:55 - (Chris Clarke): But I recognize that my tastes are not the majority taste. So we'll link to the studies we talk about in the show notes. You can check them out. All the math is in there. One of the things that Bowers, Webb.

0:21:13 - (Chris Clarke): And Rendeau found out was that there.

0:21:15 - (Chris Clarke): Are some plants that had been given.

0:21:17 - (Chris Clarke): Fairly high estimates of potential lifespan that.

0:21:19 - (Chris Clarke): Maybe actually didn't deserve those estimates. Barrel cacti, for one thing, ferrocactus cylindraceous, a very common barrel cactus in the mojave and sonoran deserts, had previously been estimated to live up to around 90 years or so. And Bowers et al.

0:21:35 - (Chris Clarke): Found evidence that it maybe has a.

0:21:37 - (Chris Clarke): Maximum life expectancy of 50 years. That's a little surprising, but they also.

0:21:43 - (Chris Clarke): Made discoveries in the opposite direction.

0:21:45 - (Chris Clarke): There's ambrosia salsola, which is a bursage.

0:21:48 - (Chris Clarke): And the ragweed family, kind of an opportunistic plant.

0:21:51 - (Chris Clarke): It's native, it grows really quickly in disturbed areas. And bowers that all found ambrosia might.

0:21:56 - (Chris Clarke): Actually be able to live more than a century.

0:21:58 - (Chris Clarke): The study also found out that shad scale atroplex camphor de Folia might be.

0:22:04 - (Chris Clarke): Able to reach a century. It's not a particularly sturdy looking plant.

0:22:07 - (Chris Clarke): It's not the kind of plant you would look at and think, oh, this will last for 100 years. But they found that of 19 individual.

0:22:14 - (Chris Clarke): Shad scale plants and photographs from 18, 9013 of them had lived until 1995.

0:22:19 - (Chris Clarke): That's a good 105 years. Beaver tail cactus 25 of the 34.

0:22:27 - (Chris Clarke): Beaver tail cacti in the 1890 photographs.

0:22:30 - (Chris Clarke): Made it all the way to 1995. The one that surprised me was a bunch grass, big galleta grass, hilaria rigida or pleurafis rigida, depending on which botanist you listen to. 43 of 63 clumps of big gaeta grass in the 1890 photographs survived until 1995. The authors suggested that four other species of perennial grasses could live that long. You don't really think of perennial grasses.

0:22:57 - (Chris Clarke): As living for more than a decade.

0:22:59 - (Chris Clarke): They're kind of ephemeral seeming, but, you know, if they can last a century, that's pretty impressive. Catclaw, acacia senegalea gregi. 234 of 274 individuals survived for that 105 year lifespan. They also found ephedra and creosote and lyceum andersoni, aka wolfberry and narrow leaf yucca. All survived that century long period in impressive numbers. So historic photos are really important. They're really wonderful aids if you can find them, but sometimes they just aren't available.

0:23:33 - (Chris Clarke): And in that case, you have to.

0:23:35 - (Chris Clarke): Do longitudinal studies in which you or your colleagues have personally witnessed both ends of the timeframe. In 1981, Martin Cody of UCLA's biology.

0:23:47 - (Chris Clarke): Department went out to an area now.

0:23:48 - (Chris Clarke): Included in Mojave National Preserve and with some associates, laid out a 360 square meter plot of Mojave desert vegetation, not too far from the granite Mountains on.

0:23:58 - (Chris Clarke): The south side of the granite Mountains.

0:24:00 - (Chris Clarke): In fact, in what's now Mojave National Preserve, 360 m², for those of you who don't do metric, is just under 4000 sqft. So Cody and his colleagues mapped the.

0:24:15 - (Chris Clarke): Individual plants, anything greater than 5 cm high.

0:24:18 - (Chris Clarke): So two inches or so, measured them.

0:24:21 - (Chris Clarke): Tagged them, recorded the species, and then.

0:24:23 - (Chris Clarke): 15 years later went out and resurveyed the same plot. So they had very detailed earlier datasets to work from. The first thing that's really notable about this study is that on this 360 square meter plot, they found 22 different species of woody plants. That's a lot of biological diversity. And in fact, another species started growing in between 1980 and 1995, stipa speciosa, bunchgrass. It was recorded in the later survey.

0:24:58 - (Chris Clarke): Not in the earlier one.

0:24:59 - (Chris Clarke): So the plot actually apparently became more.

0:25:01 - (Chris Clarke): Biologically diverse in the intervening time.

0:25:03 - (Chris Clarke): So that's pretty interesting. But more importantly, since Cody had access to this diverse set of life data for 312 individual plants of 22 different species, Cody was able to do what we might call actuarial math.

0:25:22 - (Chris Clarke): And to the degree he could with.

0:25:23 - (Chris Clarke): The data he had, he figured out.

0:25:24 - (Chris Clarke): Both the median lifespan that could be.

0:25:26 - (Chris Clarke): Expected from these plants, you know, the lifespan that half the plants were under and half the plants were over. And that was pretty impressive for a lot of the plants in excess of a century, for many of them. But he also looked at the long.

0:25:43 - (Chris Clarke): Tail on the right hand distribution in.

0:25:45 - (Chris Clarke): The bell curve of longevity of these plants to map what a minority of.

0:25:50 - (Chris Clarke): Plants, the longest lived 5% of each.

0:25:53 - (Chris Clarke): Species might get up to in age.

0:25:55 - (Chris Clarke): And you got some really astonishing figures that continue to blow my mind even.

0:25:59 - (Chris Clarke): Though I've been reading this study over and over for a good twelve years or so. This came out in 2000 in the Journal of Vegetation Science. Again, I'll spare you the methodology, but you can check the study linked in the show notes. There were a couple of plants that have really astonishingly long median lifespans in excess of a couple hundred years. A couple of chollas, pencil cholla.

0:26:25 - (Chris Clarke): The upper reaches of longevity for pencil.

0:26:27 - (Chris Clarke): Cholla, for that top 5% are just shy of 600 years.

0:26:33 - (Chris Clarke): Iodine bush.

0:26:34 - (Chris Clarke): Thamnosma, Montana. That oldest 5% could expect to live for 1151 years. That's a long time. Black brush, a really important plant, especially in the southern end of its range in the Mojave. It's a crucial nurse plant for Joshua trees. About 5% of them can expect to live for 1200 years. California buckwheat, the top 5% survival rate, 712 years. There's a bunch of really long lived plants in this area. You get the idea.

0:27:09 - (Chris Clarke): And there were some species that cody.

0:27:11 - (Chris Clarke): Couldn'T actually do the actuarial calculations on.

0:27:14 - (Chris Clarke): Because none of the plants had died in that 15 years, which can only.

0:27:18 - (Chris Clarke): Lead one to suspect that they may.

0:27:20 - (Chris Clarke): Live for a very, very long time. Those plants were ephedra nevidensis mormonti, unsurprisingly.

0:27:30 - (Chris Clarke): Creusote busch, buckhorn cholla, and Yucca shadidra.

0:27:34 - (Chris Clarke): Or Mojave yucca, mind you, having 5%.

0:27:39 - (Chris Clarke): Of a population living that long may.

0:27:41 - (Chris Clarke): Seem like a really small amount. But when you think about how many creosote bushes are in the desert, when you think about how many black brushes are in the desert, or Mojave yuccas and Mormon teas, you can basically conclude.

0:27:55 - (Chris Clarke): That there are tens of thousands of plants more than a millennium old growing.

0:27:59 - (Chris Clarke): In the deserts of North America. And that's not even looking at plants like trees in mountains up above the hottest part of the desert, or in dry washes. And it's not looking at plants that.

0:28:13 - (Chris Clarke): For one reason or another, weren't found.

0:28:15 - (Chris Clarke): In the cody study plot or the photographs that bowers, Webb, et cetera looked at.

0:28:21 - (Chris Clarke): When you think about the way plants.

0:28:24 - (Chris Clarke): Germinate in the desert, the longevity documented.

0:28:27 - (Chris Clarke): By Bowers et al and by Cody really makes sense. Most of these plants are going to rely, at least in part, on setting seed, having that seed germinate, and having.

0:28:36 - (Chris Clarke): The new plants live long enough to.

0:28:39 - (Chris Clarke): Reproduce themselves in the desert most years.

0:28:42 - (Chris Clarke): The conditions for germination just aren't going to happen.

0:28:44 - (Chris Clarke): Conditions for germination and recruitment, which is.

0:28:47 - (Chris Clarke): The other word for survival of the.

0:28:49 - (Chris Clarke): Germinating plants until they're old enough to reproduce, are sporadic.

0:28:52 - (Chris Clarke): Black brush needs about five cool, wet years, relatively cool and wet in the desert, for any seeds to be produced and germinate and then live long enough that they have a shot at getting to maturity. And coleogeny isn't particularly unusual for a lot of these things.

0:29:09 - (Chris Clarke): When you have a landscape that's characterized.

0:29:11 - (Chris Clarke): By drought, it's safe to assume that most germination of seeds is going to take place in the wettest possible years. And when those wettest possible years come.

0:29:20 - (Chris Clarke): Once every 25 or 50 or 100.

0:29:22 - (Chris Clarke): Years, plants that have very long lifespans.

0:29:25 - (Chris Clarke): Are going to fare better.

0:29:27 - (Chris Clarke): Evolutionarily speaking, if you have 100 creosote.

0:29:29 - (Chris Clarke): Bushes and you have a 500 year.

0:29:31 - (Chris Clarke): Drought, that's not enough to kill creosotes outright, but enough to keep them from germinating successfully, then having those five out of that hundred creosote bushes able to survive longer than the drought, that'll make sure that there will be creosotes in the future. And that's not even getting into the survival of organisms and reproduction through clonal offshoots of one kind or another, which.

0:29:54 - (Chris Clarke): Is how King clone came to be.

0:29:55 - (Chris Clarke): It's how Mojave yuccas often reproduce and.

0:29:58 - (Chris Clarke): Maintain themselves in the landscape as incredibly old, large clumps of yucca. Many chollas propagate almost exclusively through vegetative.

0:30:07 - (Chris Clarke): Reproduction, aka cloning, aka oh, my God. This goddamn stem of cholla just got stuck in my pant leg.

0:30:14 - (Chris Clarke): Let me drop it on the ground.

0:30:15 - (Chris Clarke): Here and walk away. Cylindropuntia bigelowi teddy bear Cholla doesn't set fertile seeds. There is a sort of geeky reason for this. Teddy bear cholla is triploid. It's got three copies of each chromosome in each cell, and that makes it really hard to set viable seed because you need to have an even number.

0:30:35 - (Chris Clarke): Of chromosomes in order for the seed.

0:30:37 - (Chris Clarke): To be viable, because when you do.

0:30:40 - (Chris Clarke): Mitosis to make those seeds, you're splitting.

0:30:42 - (Chris Clarke): Your genome in half and then reassembling it.

0:30:44 - (Chris Clarke): If you've got odd numbers of chromosomes.

0:30:47 - (Chris Clarke): It means that sexual reproduction through seed production is going to be unlikely. So every patch of teddy bear cholla that you see is very likely all.

0:30:56 - (Chris Clarke): Grown from a single stem of teddy bear cholla that latched onto an animal.

0:31:00 - (Chris Clarke): And moved to a new place. There are places like the Bigelow Cholla.

0:31:04 - (Chris Clarke): Garden wilderness in the Mojave Desert in.

0:31:06 - (Chris Clarke): California that have square miles of cholla.

0:31:09 - (Chris Clarke): Probably all from the same one piece of cholla that got moved there somehow.

0:31:13 - (Chris Clarke): Some countless thousands of years ago, and.

0:31:16 - (Chris Clarke): That just grew and grew and broke.

0:31:17 - (Chris Clarke): Off and rolled around, got washed downhill in the washes, more grew.

0:31:21 - (Chris Clarke): And I haven't seen anybody even think.

0:31:23 - (Chris Clarke): About how to calculate the age of a patch like that. Let me know if you've done it. I think that'd be a really fascinating doctoral thesis. If all the chollas in the Bigelow.

0:31:34 - (Chris Clarke): Cholla garden are genetically identical, which is.

0:31:36 - (Chris Clarke): Very likely, how long would it take.

0:31:39 - (Chris Clarke): For one piece of cholla to grow into an entire valley full of cholla? So this is all interesting if you.

0:31:44 - (Chris Clarke): Like old plants, but to me it.

0:31:46 - (Chris Clarke): Says something about the desert that I.

0:31:47 - (Chris Clarke): Think if more people knew about it.

0:31:50 - (Chris Clarke): They'D be a lot more cautious about what they did in the desert.

0:31:52 - (Chris Clarke): You think about places back east or on the west coast where a 30 zero year old tree which might have.

0:32:00 - (Chris Clarke): Been planted by George Washington or was.

0:32:01 - (Chris Clarke): There when the first settlers got to Santa Barbara or whatever.

0:32:05 - (Chris Clarke): You get people with 200 or 300 year old trees in their neighborhood and they want to defend them.

0:32:10 - (Chris Clarke): They see them as elders, as ancient and rightly so. And if you show up with a bulldozer to build a strip mall, people.

0:32:19 - (Chris Clarke): Are going to climb that tree and not come down. And that's fair.

0:32:22 - (Chris Clarke): 300 years is respectable for a coast live oak or pin oak back east.

0:32:28 - (Chris Clarke): Growing in an urban environment, sugar maples, you get redwoods that are properly revered for their lifespans in excess of two.

0:32:35 - (Chris Clarke): Millennia, if they're lucky. Bristlecone pines in the White Mountains and elsewhere getting up towards 5000 years, some.

0:32:42 - (Chris Clarke): Of them revered worldwide for their advanced age. And meanwhile there are probably hundreds of thousands of creosote bushes, probably tens of.

0:32:52 - (Chris Clarke): Thousands of mojave yuccas that are older.

0:32:54 - (Chris Clarke): Than the oldest bristlecone pine. Shouldnt we revere them to? Shouldnt we take into account their age when were talking about bulldozing a section of desert for new Airbnb complex or a new solar field, either of which has probably going to last 20 years? Isnt it hubris to think that we know better how to use a piece of land than a plant thats been living there for tens of centuries? Just a thought.

0:33:16 - (Chris Clarke): And I said at the beginning of this episode that Joshua trees, as short.

0:33:23 - (Chris Clarke): Lived as they are compared to a lot of these things, will in certain circumstances survive for much longer than the.

0:33:29 - (Chris Clarke): 250 or so years that is taken as their typical lifespan these days.

0:33:33 - (Chris Clarke): In the western part of their range, western Joshua trees are extremely likely to.

0:33:38 - (Chris Clarke): Grow and reproduce through cloning themselves.

0:33:42 - (Chris Clarke): For some reason, in the western part of the range, over by Los Angeles.

0:33:45 - (Chris Clarke): And ridgecrest, California, Joshua trees will clone.

0:33:49 - (Chris Clarke): Themselves more often than they set seed and have that seed germinate. And as a result, you get huge.

0:33:55 - (Chris Clarke): Clumps of Joshua trees that have common.

0:33:57 - (Chris Clarke): Roots that probably all germinated from the same seed at one point or another and send up a main stem.

0:34:04 - (Chris Clarke): That main stem get side shoots like the creosote. They're called stolons. Those stolons will grow into their own individual stems of Joshua tree. They look like separate plants, but they are not. They are the same plant with multiple trunks, and after 250 years or so, some of those trunks will die back. But the plant itself keeps living through.

0:34:26 - (Chris Clarke): Putting up new trunks. So in that one area, under certain.

0:34:30 - (Chris Clarke): Circumstances, some very small percentage of the total number of Joshua trees of both species that live in this world might reach ages in excess of 1000 years.

0:34:40 - (Chris Clarke): But that doesn't mean an individual stem of Joshua tree is going to ever.

0:34:43 - (Chris Clarke): Live more than 300 years.

0:34:46 - (Chris Clarke): And with that excessively nuanced thought, we.

0:34:48 - (Chris Clarke): Are wrapping up this episode of 90 miles from the desert Protection podcast.

0:34:53 - (Chris Clarke): I want to thank Anna Stumpf for joining our Patreon supporters.

0:34:56 - (Chris Clarke): Good to have you aboard, Anna.

0:34:58 - (Chris Clarke): Thanks go out as well to Joe Jeffrey, our voiceover guy, and Martin Mancha.

0:35:02 - (Chris Clarke): Our podcast artist guy. Our theme song, moody western, is by Brightside Studio.

0:35:08 - (Chris Clarke): Other music in this episode comes to.

0:35:10 - (Chris Clarke): You via envato.com dot. I want to thank you for listening again. Check us out at nine zeromilesfromneedles.com if you are curious about our previous episodes, if you want to add a donate to that URL, that'd be great. You can check out how you can help us out. In the meantime, take care of yourselves. The desert really needs you and we will see you at the next watering hole.

0:37:38 - (Joe Geoffrey): 90 miles from needles, is a production of the desert advocacy media network. Work.