Researchers succeed in recording the sound of Pando, the largest living creature of all times, located in Southern Utah. Researchers believe that listening to the recordings could provide a better understanding of the tree creature’s health and thus, preserve it as it holds a very important place in the region’s natural habitat.
What Does the Gigantic Pando Looks Like?
If you look at it without prior knowledge, it would appear that Pando is a forest made up of different aspen trees (Populus tremuloides), but once you examine it more closely, you can see that it is a single tree that has had its DNA cloned thousands of times. More than 40,000 stems emerge from an intricate system of interconnected roots below ground, all genetically identical, proof that it is a one-and-only tree.
Whispers from the Greatest Living Being
Jeff Rice, an audio engineer in Seattle, has been fascinated by the existence of the Pando. That is why he traveled to Utah and using a hydrophone, normally used to capture sounds underwater, began to record the rustling of Pando leaves in the wind. The soundscape he heard surprised him, as it was easy to also hear birdsong in the canopy, as well as creatures scurrying on land within the mystical forest formed by a single tree, a recording you can listen to here.
But Rice’s curiosity soon grew much more and he wanted to hear what we can’t see, what goes underground in Pando’s complex roots. “Their sounds are so many different elements, but there’s also this rich subway soundscape. There’s more than just the shaking of leaves. I started to discover that a lot was going on there,” says Rice, who partnered with Friends of Pando, a nonprofit organization that seeks to preserve the giant arboreal creature.
Rice and Friends of Pando thought that recording the subway soundscape could help them understand more about the health of the forest, which is vulnerable to changes in the environment. To do so, they dropped the hydrophone down a hole in the tree trunks, which they called ‘the Pando portal.’ “I could reach into the hole and connect the hydrophone directly to the roots,” Rice said. “I plugged it in almost like a plug into a socket. We immediately started hearing interesting sounds, but what stood out was a low, drone-like sound,” he explained.
Suddenly, Rice had an idea: to prove that Pando is the same interconnected being. He tapped a branch about 30 meters away from the portal and to his surprise, the hydrophone registered it as a thud. “We could hear the tapping,” said Lance Oditt, CEO of Friends of Pando. “This helps demonstrate that Pando is interconnected, and not just at ground level. The root system is like a subway lattice.”
The subway recordings, which you can listen to here, will be analyzed further and both Rice and Oditt hope it will help them understand the giant living thing, thus helping it stay healthy for another thousand years.
This story was originally published by Alejandra Martínez in Spanish by Ecoosfera.