KQED Quest: A question unanswered – what’s up with these stunted, bushy albino redwoods?
I just spent a pleasant six minutes and 46 seconds visiting corners of Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in the Santa Cruz mountains, via video produced by Christopher Bauer at KQED‘s superb Quest science unit in San Francisco. What I saw is a paean to and meditation on mystery, and on surprise, and on the semi-religious feelings inspired by wandering through an old growth redwood grove and finding ghosts.
I also see an opportunity for some heavier reporting. The program is all about reverence and the diversity of nature, but without providing much more than mood. That’s enough for most purposes as this is not a big investigative report but a little reverie on the delights to be found in the deep, dark woods. But still….
The news is that here, as occurs in other parts of the trees’ range, one may occasionally find at the bases of larger trees, nourished by their root systems, growths of pale and nearly dead-white branches and foliage. Perfect needles and twigs, alive but not green. No chlorophyl. Like, says one of those interviewed, offspring who sit on the couch all day but don’t go out and get a job. The images seemed a bit familiar. I am fairly convinced, by hazy but perhaps concocted memory, I have seen myself some such brushy white expressions from the boles of otherwise normal redwoods and wondered, why would the tree do that? The show calls them albino redwood trees, but the albino parts it shows us are more like tangled brush on the periphery of the majestic real thing’s base. A little digging around reveals that, according to this story a few years ago by outdoors writer Tom Stienstra at the SF Chronicle, one is 70 feet tall. He says other species are known to sprout albino branches but only redwoods produce offspring that – with the help of mother tree roots – grow to something resembling maturity.
I wish not to be churlish and break the spell of romantic nature here. But I have questions. How many other kinds of trees, if any, develop such things? What do botanists handy with gene-sequencing kits say, if anything? Do they produce viable seeds that can sprout if not persist very long? Has some grad student somewhere done a thesis on these albinos, or even some post-doc or professor published a discourse? The sources we meet in the video, to good effect if not exposition of researched discovery, are a wise historian emeritus at a local community college and one of the park docents. Both dedicated naturalists. But one wonders whether dedicated professional scientists might add to the mix.
- Charlie Petit
September 1st, 2010 at 6:26 pm
Thanks for the critique Charlie. You bring up some great points. When we began our exploration I was told by a few people that they were uncomfortable telling us exactly where the albino redwood trees were for fear that people would then go out and chop them down for Christmas trees. That put it in my head that, while perhaps not a majestic redwood, they were at least “Christmas tree-like.” That really isn’t the case. Albino redwoods are, as you pointed out, more like sprouts or bushes. But so are young redwood trees. That’s the way the species works.
Your questions mirror many of mine during our interviews. And we covered some of them in our adjoining story blog. See: http://www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2010/08/26/producers-notes-for-science-on-the-spot-albino-redwoods-ghosts-of-the-forest/#more-7672
In the hard-to-find book “The White Redwoods” by Douglas Davis and Dale Holderman, published in 1980, they report about finding an albino redwood with pollen buds. Holderman performed an experiment to see if he could produce albino redwoods from seed and discovered that indeed he could. But without the host or mother tree to get nutrients from, the albino redwood seedlings quickly died. From what I have gathered, many plant species can and do also produce albinos but without being able to tap into a root system such as that of the California coast redwoods, the mutated plants also quickly die.
In our story and blog post we hoped to showcase the wonders of the redwood forest. There are still many new things to discover below and within the tall trees. I also have to admit, I hoped to wet the appetite of some hungry PhD student studying genetics and looking for a thesis topic. And I’m happy to report that may in fact be the case! My next goal is to follow that person out into the field, then into the lab and see what they discover. But that will be another QUEST story.
Thanks again for your comments and questions.
-Chris Bauer
September 2nd, 2010 at 12:32 am
That’s a terrific and instructive comment. Thanks for making it, Chris, and for including a link to the producer’s notes that I neglected to read. / Charlie