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Bizarre Self-Destructing Palm Tree Found
Smivs writes "A giant self-destructing palm tree has been discovered in Madagascar. The palm is 20m (60ft) high with leaves 5m (16ft) long, the tallest tree of its type in the country, but for most of its life — around 100 years — it appears fairly unremarkable apart from its size. However, when it flowers, it puts so much energy into an impressive flower-spike, that it eventually collapses and dies.
Dr John Dransfield, who announced the tree in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, is baffled as to how it came to be in the country.
It bears a resemblance to a species of palm found in regions of Asia; 6,000km away. It is thought that the palm has gone through a remarkable evolution since Madagascar split with India some 80m years ago."
The best people in history have thrown all of their energy into their work, and produced works of genius.
Then they die, because they had nothing left.
Of course, middle management and morons live on. This is why humanity is doomed.
Given that in most areas I can see individual cars on the ground, I'm not too impressed...
Shouldn't it be the Iomega tree?
if it is a coconut palm, it was probably carried there two african swallows and a piece of string.
Bizarre Self-Destructing Palm Tree Found
Ah...the new Britney Spears model.
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
This isn't the first germinate-then-die species.
It may, however, be among the largest and the first to use gravity to kill itself.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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The tree lives 100 years and then gives a last hurrah with a magnificant burst of flowers and dies. Not a bad way to go at all, eh?
I have some theories:
Dies once it has produced it's fruit. Possibly to allow it's seedlings some light. Also, more fruit means more likelihood of a successful bunch of seedlings.
How did it get to Madagascar? Well, it's flowers produce lots of nectar but not sure if the fruit itself is edible - probably the Polynesians carried it with them. After all, they are the ones who first colonized Madagascar not the Africans.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Awww. And I was expecting schrapnel.
"is baffled as to how the it came to be in the country"
Looks like they left out fsck in the middle.Life is so amazing. Is it not currently the biological opinion that basically all (complex) life is programmed to self-destruct? I've heard it said that death itself (from 'old age') may have been an evolutionary convention - in fact, evolution seems to require it to operate at all.
This tree is a pretty extraordinary instance, however. Though I do think there are other organisms which self-sacrifice in order to propagate - so it is not exactly unprecedented.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
No wonder this is a Slashdot story pick. People around here are very familiar with palms and reproductive spikes.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
but if the palm tree is not too evolutionarily distinct, the palm may have been brought there by humans more recently from indonesia, not survived for 40M years in isolation
and i say this because madagascar was populated by modern humans from indonesia first, and africans second
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Madagascar#Pre-history
linguistically and culturally, madagascar is closer to indonesia than it is to mainland africa, which is rather bizarre when you look at a map
indonesians could have bought the palm fruit with them, and the palm might still be found in indonesia, or went extinct there
it's a plausible alternative theory to the 40M years in isolation hypothesis
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This kind of life cycle - slowly gathering energy for a long time, then expending it all in a burst of flowering activity - is fairly common among plants. I'm sure botanists specializing in palm trees are fascinated, but why is this on the front page at Slashdot?
It's more bizarre than they think. It's really just an annual plant, with its year based on Uranus.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Does the tree flower after a hundred years and expend so much energy that it kills itself? Or does the tree put on an impressive flowering process because after a hundred years it's dying and needs to spread some seeds before it's too late?
whoa whoa whoa, 80 million years? how's that possible, when we all know that the world was created around 4,000 B.C.
in the immortal words of socrates, "i drank what?"
"The plant is said to be so big it can be seen on Google Earth"
Not quite, see that entry on GSS.
Additionally, seeing a single tree on Google Earth isn't something special at all,
there's millions of them in the high resolution imagery areas.
and see if it is filled with solid rocket fuel.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
From what I understand, scientists knew of the tree but had never witnessed it flowering. After all, how could you miss discovering something this big?
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
If you mean the lemmings that run off a cliff right after spreading their seed then maybe.
Many a lemming has run off a cliff without producing offspring. This is A Good Thing.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"Self-desctructing Palm" And guess what I thought about? Annoying DRM-laden *phones that brick themself upon command, self-destructing movie files, or perhaps Exploding Lithium-powered Portable Computing(TM) ...
I hope my old trustworthy Palm V is loaded with neither defective-by-design nor the old common pyrotechnical defective-by-mistake :-)
Sounds similar to the behavior of certain strains of bamboo - hang around for x years, then flower and self destruct.
Salmon also die in the process of spawning themselves. They basically use up every ounce of fat and energy while swimming upstream to spawning waters and producing eggs. But I've never heard of anybody referring to this process as "self destruction."
Hey, I don't need your abuse, I'm quite capable of abusing myself!
there is a variant of the giant palm that propagates from lightening strikes. A bolt hits the tree, explodes its seed pods and sends them all over the place.
the tree spike that grows out of the top is not part of the palm tree. maybe it's a parasitic tree that uses the palm as a host?
"This palm tree will self-destruct..." =)
Isn't that like a century plant?
It's fairly common here (south of Spain), I have one in my garden!!
Did you click on the wrong thread there? WTF?
I think Google Maps/Google Earth don't have the most detailed satellite information for most of Madagascar. So the level of detail at which it's surprising to be able to see this tree could perhaps be one zoom level out from the level at which it's unsurprising to be able to see cars.
i used the word as a synonym for "remarkable", which is how i feel about the bizarre (cough) history of madagascar
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Niven's stage trees.
It might not have mattered though. We have no idea how the other candidates would have handled the situation. It basically boils down to the fact that at election time all the choices sucked.
It is very similar to Bamboo flowering... http://www.bamboogarden.com/when%20bamboo%20flowers.htm
"They're growing mechanical trees now. They grow to their full height, then they chop themselves down."
-- Lauri Anderson (from which song, I forget.)
Technically, murder-suicide does not violate the golden rule.
Reminds me of an Agave plant we had out behind our house.
For my entire childhood it was just this big spiky Aloe like bush behind the house. About 5 feet tall. Then one time when I was in my late 20's it grew this absolutely gigantic spike about the height of a telephone pole, flowered, and then produced hundreds of little budding plantlets that fell off and took root. The original plant then promptly died.
That's because the palm tree is really a top secret message from God that takes 100 years to decipher and dies just before it can be read. I knew he was sadistic all along.
What has been said, Lemmings are not suicidal. Indeed they are very good swimmers, it is just that when they seek out new habitat after overcrowding, they tend to migrate long distances. After swimming for days (week+ sometimes), they eventually succumb to fatigue and drown.
Pretty hardy little rodents.
-- my sig got
I will blame you and everybody else who voted for someone who had *no* chance in h3ll of winning. If you didn't like Bush, you should have voted for Gore or Kerry, unless you think they would have been worse than Bush...which while possible I see as being highly unlikely. Otherwise any vote for your 3rd party, or not voting at all, was a vote *for* Bush
A friend of mine voted for Colin Powell...because it made her feel good. Um, great you feel good and we'll all go to h3ll in a handbasket, but dammit you go feel good!
If you want a 3rd party choice, build up a party but don't try and get an independent into the top office on the first shot, it just won't happen.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Whatever you do, do not let that "flower-spike" catch fire.
As a sincere C++ programmer, I always provide a clean destructor for all my trees. AVL, binary, oct/quad, nnary... I have written it so many times. And they cleanly self destruct when they go out of scope.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Guess I shouldn't be too surprised -- I heard India got jealous after Madagascar did that Disney movie. Which one gets the kids?
Seriously, what am I supposed to do with this information?
Hey, ladies, have I got a story for you!
Banana trees do the same. After they flower & produce fruit, they pretty much die. Not immediately so you usually just cut them down when harvesting it. But if you leave them up, they die and rot.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
A young tree does not need its parent to grow. Parent tree may take resources that the young tree could use if both are near each other. In an environment with scarce resources, it may make some evolutionary sense for the parent tree to die after flowering. Not that I like this idea, though.
So, essentially, it is the Cicada of plant species.
I think you misunderstood the reference. I actually voted for Gore/Kerry.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
20m = 60f
5m = 16f
Obviously meters shrink, or feet grow, the more you have of them.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Robert Reed's "Good Mountain" appears in Gardner Dozois's 24th "Year's Best Science Fiction". It's about life on a planet half-covered with self-destructing trees.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Sure, this is neat, but there are many plants which are monocarpic. Many are also quite long-lived, such as the agave.
I'm not interested unless it's at least 90 years old. Sorry, I just don't have that kind of patience.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
With fronds like that, who needs enemies?
Am I the only one that thought from the title that the tree blew up in a ball of flames? For a second there I thought there were muslim extremist palm trees rampant in Madagascar.
He did miss the reference.
Or at least didn't understand it.
Some people are just looking for a reason to exclaim there pet cause.
Well, Kang is coming *ow* and he *ow* brought his *ow* whip.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The language spoken in Madagascar is "malagasy". So is the language of the "Malay" people of Malaysia. The oldest ports around the Western European coast are called "Malaga".
Is this the remnant of some ancient global people? Did they bring a self-destructing palm from Asia to a giant African island?
--
make install -not war
"Works best if you have a neat place with most of your action figures tucked out of sight."
"Madagascar split with India some 80m years ago."
Um. You mean [South] Africa. Or the Iraq.
If it split from India, it is on the continental drift bullet train, dumbass.
Not unlike another Palm(tm) who is also in the middle of committing suicide.
This palm tree will self-destruct...in one year.
Now we finally know what Q used to make paper for James Bond.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
now lecture me again about the supposed western soft racism in my remarks
what a blind moron
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The most majestic would be the Caryotas, Fishtail Palms, where the solitary columnar types go off in one spectacular year to year and a half reproductive frenzy. Then they die. Caryota "maxima," and obtusa, are especially jaw dropping.
Also Arengas, Corypha umbraculifera, etc. do this.
Must have been a *very* slow news day!!
http://www.plantapalm.com/vpe/introduction/vpe_introduction.htm
http://www.palmtreeservices.com.au/news/2007/02/11/monocarpic-palms/
-Luen
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar Who could think you under the table
David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya 'Bout the raising of the wrist
Socrates himself was permanently pissed
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will With half a pint of shandy got particularly ill
Plato, they say, could stick it away Half a crate of whiskey every day
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle
Hobbes was fond of his dram
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart "I drink therefore I am"
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
I wonder if it's related to the Talipot palm, which has a similar life cycle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talipot_palm
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
I have to admit, this is the best off-topic goatse snipe in recent /. history.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
I Like to Move It, Move It
Kew Gardens news story, with lots more images and information.
It grows for some incredibly long time (like 100 years or something), and then blooms itself to death. The weird thing about the bamboo, though, is that every member of that species in the world does so simultaneously.
Speaking of the gravity part, though, it sure would suck to have one of these growing next to your house...
living to a hundred then dying in the process of reprodution? Thats how I plan on going to. Man, plants are always stealing my best ideas...
To illustrate, suppose that two people of the same age are on the short list to win one of the prizes.
Since the committee can't make up its mind, it is about to decide to split the award between the two of them.
But then, one of them dies just before that decision is made.
The living one will get the prize, and the dead one won't.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana