Author: bbickett

Trees have the potential to be the largest organisms on Earth. The world’s tallest tree, dubbed Hyperion, is 380 ft tall and weighs over 1,600,000 lbs. Compared this to the world’s largest animal, a particularly massive blue whale which was 100 ft long and weighed 380,000 lbs, the simply massive size of this tree should be obvious. And unlike a whale, a tree is much less likely collapse and crush itself under its own weight. Trees need to be tall, even if doing so consumes a lot of resources, in order to compete for sunlight. So what lets trees get this big, and what limits their height?