Giant African Baobab Trees Die Suddenly After Thousands of Years (theguardian.com)

Some of Africa's oldest and biggest baobab trees have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, according to researchers. From a report: The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and in some cases as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated. "We report that nine of the 13 oldest ... individuals have died, or at least their oldest parts/stems have collapsed and died, over the past 12 years," they wrote in the scientific journal Nature Plants, describing "an event of an unprecedented magnitude." "It is definitely shocking and dramatic to experience during our lifetime the demise of so many trees with millennial ages," said the study's co-author Adrian Patrut of the Babes-Bolyai University in Romania. Among the nine were four of the largest African baobabs. While the cause of the die-off remains unclear, the researchers "suspect that the demise of monumental baobabs may be associated at least in part with significant modifications of climate conditions that affect southern Africa in particular." Further research is needed, said the team from Romania, South Africa and the United States, "to support or refute this supposition."

Comments

Well now we know how the cat is doing

[SuperKendall]

Baobob trees were fine for thousands of years... ...until 2005 when researches started examining them, then nearly 70% of the oldest ones die.

HMM.

Re:Well now we know how the cat is doing

[blindseer]

Just not yet, and not this suddenly ...

Using "suddenly" and "over 12 years" together does not compute. I'd be interested in seeing some kind of evidence on how these trees fared in the past. It's quite amazing for these trees to have lived for so long but it would seem feasible to me that 1000 years ago we could have seen trees of this type die off then too. The changing of the climate then could have also done them in.

Consider an analogous situation on a human. We see a 150 year old man fall ill and die. Do we blame this on climate change too? Perhaps his diet of only fresh milk and fruit killed him. Maybe it was the pipes he smoked when he was in his 40s, 50s, and 60s. Or maybe it just that he's 150 years old and a person living this long is quite unusual to begin with and it's impossible to tell what the final nail in his coffin was.

A more humorous take on this human analogy... I recall a TV character making fun of another about how he takes such great care to eat healthy, exercise, abstain from alcohol, not smoke, and generally fixate on living for a long time. The punch line was something about looking foolish in his old age, lying in a hospital bed, dying of NOTHING. Everything alive dies sometime, pinning the cause on something specific can be a fool's errand.