“The pando” has become a casual way to refer to the COVID-19 pandemic, but deep in the woods of central Utah, the Pando is the name for what scientists regard as the largest living organism in the world:over 40,000 massive aspen trees that are actually a single organism thought to stem from the same root. And despite thriving for several centuries, perhaps even millenia, this 106-acre beast is “breaking up” due to human influence.
“To the untrained eye, it looks like deer and cattle are the villains here, but both of those species are highly manipulated by humans,” Paul Rogers, an ecologist at Utah State University who published a recent study on the disintegrating Pando in the journal of Conservation Science and Practice, told Motherboard.
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Although it appears as if these hungry herbivores have been eating away at the Pando’s “world’s largest organism” title for decades, after analyzing 64 plots of it, Rogers found that these animals are not to blame for depleting the Pando. Rather, government efforts to remove predators like bears and wolves from states like Utah, Montana and Wyoming have thrown the natural system off balance.
Such interventions, including killing off wolf populations through poisoning, aren’t new, and occurred throughout the early 1900s. Since states make money from selling hunting licenses, and more deer means better hunting conditions and more profit, the issue remains politically and economically controversial, and more difficult to solve.
“We took away the predators and elevated the numbers [of prey animals] so that people who like to hunt or see animals will be more successful,” Rogers says. Unfortunately, this has resulted in greater numbers of deer, that are more domesticated and sedentary than wild deer left to their own devices. “Too many deer is a big problem,” Rogers warns.
Instead of reintegrating wolves back into the environment, or taking other steps to reduce the population of deer, Utah has opted to use fencing as a way to keep animals away and preserve the Pando. While this may appear to be an effective short term solution, due to the unique way these aspen grow, fencing can hinder natural regrowth that used to occur when the trees die off.
“It’s like putting a bandaid on a really big wound,” he says. “We still have a bleeding problem.”
If the Pando is strained to the point of no longer being the world’s largest living organism, it may not be the end of the world. But because the Pando problem is such a microcosm, that makes it an example of how to address the deleterious effects of human activity on natural systems and could hold lessons for addressing other issues like global warming. Still, its shrinkage, and the mishandling of measures to stop it, is a bad sign for the future of humanity.
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“We have the ability to change course, that’s what the data and information point out,” Rogers said. If not, another contender for the world’s largest living organism is the “Humongous Fungus,” a honey mushroom that has swelled throughout Oregon, again, as a result of humans manipulating the environment.
In the end, Rogers’ research concludes that if the Humongous Fungus dethrones the Pando one day, it’s not the deers’ fault. “The finger points back at us, pretty obviously.”
