Albino Backwoods
June 12, 2012 2:08 PM   Subscribe

With "limp and waxy" needles giving the tree the appearance of a "a glow-in-the-dark star you might find in a kid's bedroom", Albino Redwoods lack chlorophyll and grow as a parasite grafted onto another tree. These rarities still manage to grow up to 80 feet tall, and are of interest to those studying the redwood genome.
posted by Talkie Toaster (16 comments total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
There's a giant Albino Redwood stump, with live shoots coming out, in a campground in Big Sur along Old Route 1. The tree was cut down, (a long time ago,) because someone thought it was diseased and that it would infect the other Redwoods.
posted by StickyCarpet at 2:15 PM on June 12, 2012 [1 favorite]


Xasauan made a recent visit to the site of a legendary white redwood here in the Santa Lucias and discovered a resurrection.
posted by squalor at 2:33 PM on June 12, 2012


Note to holiday decorators: These are not the long-sought natural white Christmas trees.
posted by longsleeves at 2:37 PM on June 12, 2012 [2 favorites]


NYT article from January 7, 1897. (PDF)
Fascinating.
Never heard of this.
posted by Seamus at 2:39 PM on June 12, 2012


What I found fascinating was that the coast redwood is a hexaploid—each of its cells containing six sets of chromosomes. Six! Wow.

According to this site, 'Its redwood cousins, like humans, are diploids, with only two sets of chromosomes. "Being a hexaploid is not unusual in the plant kingdom, but it is among trees—hexaploids tend to be grasses and non-woody plants," says Rogers. Some hardwood trees are polyploids (having multiple chromosomes), but the coast redwood is the only known hexaploid conifer.'
posted by Petrot at 2:42 PM on June 12, 2012


That's incredibly cool.

I guess it still has the leaves to utilize whatever energy stores the host tree is losing to the parasite. Unless I can't remember my old botany class as well as I think and the stem/branch components can metabolize such leached goods just as well.
posted by Slackermagee at 2:48 PM on June 12, 2012


The Albino Redwoods seeded the earth with plant life, then left star maps deep in the soil, waiting until the Redwoods mastered FTL travel to visit their makers.
posted by benzenedream at 3:35 PM on June 12, 2012


Absolutely amazing.
posted by Freen at 3:37 PM on June 12, 2012


This is great. How did I never hear of these before? Eighty-foot-tall albino parasitic trees! Thank you!
posted by Scientist at 4:00 PM on June 12, 2012 [1 favorite]


I LIVED in Redwood country and never heard of Albino Redwoods! Cool! Thanks!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 5:27 PM on June 12, 2012


If this is a mutation, as the articles imply, and it's recessive, as it is in most human cases, how in hell could it possibly occur in all six copies of the relevant chromosome?

Maybe it's epigentic.

Or maybe there's some ongoing mechanism that duplicates chromosomes in redwood seeds.

After all, redwood relatives are diploid, but redwoods themselves are hexapoloid, implying that the ancestral redwood may have arisen when a diploid seed had each of its chromosomes duplicated three times (or more complicated multi-step variations on that theme) and then grew into the first redwood tree.

Autumn crocus aren't native to the California coast, are they?
posted by jamjam at 6:43 PM on June 12, 2012


If this is a mutation, as the articles imply, and it's recessive, as it is in most human cases, how in hell could it possibly occur in all six copies of the relevant chromosome?

Very rarely, that's how.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:46 PM on June 12, 2012


And it is very rarely seen; I seem to remember a figure of 29 total individuals from one or another of the links.

However, suppose the albino allele is present at a rate of 1%-- which seems quite high to me.

Then the probability any randomly chosen chromosome has it is 1/100, and if redwoods were diploid (two sets of chromosomes) you'd see it at most in (1/100)(1/100), or one in ten thousand of the population.

But redwoods are hexaploid (six sets of chromosomes), so if it's randomly distributed, you'd see it in (1/100)(1/100)(1/100)(1/100)(1/100)(1/100), or one in a trillion of the population.

I doubt there are as many as a billion redwoods, counting even small seedlings.
posted by jamjam at 9:49 AM on June 13, 2012


There doesn't have to actually be that many trees. Probability and reality aren't always in perfect sync. Heck, they could all be albino if the luck was right.

Besides, it's not the trees you need to count, but the seeds. That's the number of trees times the number of cones times the number of seeds per cone. Easily a billion.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:58 AM on June 13, 2012


What I found fascinating was that the coast redwood is a hexaploid—each of its cells containing six sets of chromosomes. Six! Wow.

That sounds like a challenging genome assembly project. What an insane amount of data!!
posted by bluefly at 12:20 PM on June 13, 2012


I think your grasp of the probabilities here is not all it could be, Sys Rq, but I'm very grateful to you for your comments, because they forced me to confront just how high the prevalence of the albino allele would have to be for us to see so many ghost redwoods due to ordinary Mendelian assortment in the face of the hexaploid redundancy of redwoods, and now, after a little reflection, I think my argument can be turned on its head to show us just why redwoods need to be hexaploid-- which is a major drain on resources available to the tree, and would therefore be a major selective disadvantage-- when all its relatives are able to get along being diploid.

Redwoods in a mature stand are both huge and pretty close together, and that limits the amount of usable light which reaches the forest floor (which has the effect of shading out possible competitors). So much so, I'm guessing, that redwood seedlings themselves would have very little chance of getting high enough to become self-sufficient from their own photosynthesis without a big boost from a mature tree, without, in fact, a long period as essentially a parasite on a mature tree (which is probably a close relative most of the time, kin selection and all that).

So for the mature tree, ghost seedlings could be indistinguishable from healthy ones for many years, and if the prevalence of the ghost allele is high, that could make a strategy of helping seedlings out more expensive than it could possibly be worth if the trees were only diploid or tetraploid, because that many more ghosts would take too much away from mature trees for the forest to sustain itself in its current form, and it would have to become less dense, or the redwoods would have to be much smaller, or both. and that would open the way for possible competitors to grow and compete with the redwoods, conceivably displacing them from some of their range.

So, redwoods are hexaploid to cope with the problems that would otherwise be caused by the high frequency of the ghost allele, I'd say.
posted by jamjam at 3:27 PM on June 13, 2012


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