Some Unusual Trees - Hacker News

Posted by simplegeek 14 hours ago

Some Unusual Trees(thoughts.wyounas.com)

238 points | 69 comments

cluckindan 13 hours ago|

Related: There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically)

https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...

orthoxerox 10 hours ago||

There's no such thing as a fish either. Unless you count whales, parrots and Kanye West as fish.

Loughla 44 minutes ago|||

If you like trivia and British humor the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish is amazing.

gus_massa 7 hours ago||||

"Fish" is almost a good category, you only need to nuke a unusual branch and call it a day.

A better comparison is "Fliyers", that include most insects, most birds, bats, pterodactyls and perhaps a few gliding and kitting animals. It evolveded and disappeared a few times.

tomaskafka 12 hours ago||

Thank you! Isn’t it amazing how a rigid hierarchical categorization system fails everywhere you actually look into details? See also category theory vs prototype theory.

TeMPOraL 10 hours ago|||

It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxonomies are arbitrary - they're created by people for some specific purpose, and judged by useful they are in serving that purpose.

You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.

disqard 7 hours ago|||

Indeed, one of the epistemological lessons for me when confronting the power of LLMs is that a sort of "intellectual capability" can emerge in any system, from sheer scale/complexity alone.

If you're interested, check out Rupert Sheldrake:

https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Consc...

j16sdiz 7 hours ago|||

It's the same people complaining tomato is fruit, so it must not be a vegetable.

robocat 6 hours ago||

Relatedly I just noticed potato fruit (potato berries) the other day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato_fruit

Part of the same Solanaceae/nightshade family also includes bell peppers and eggplants. To help confuse the Tomato plant and the Tomato vegetable further.

adammarples 6 hours ago||||

Well, no, what we're saying here is that if you use a rigid, hierarchical catergorisation system (cladistics) you can say that there is no such monophyletic grouping as a fish. Ie there is no grouping with a common ancestor that encompasses all the things, and only the things, that we commonly call fish. That system hasn't failed, it's fine, its purpose is to categorise things in terms of evolutionary descent. However, under that system humans are reptiles and trees and fish aren't useful categories. There exist other systems of catergorisation, which are polyphyletic or paraphyletic, which fit better with commonly used language, and we get back fish, trees, non-avian non-mammalian reptiles. Neither of them are wrong, they're just differently used and differently useful. It's like knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but nobody wants it in a fruit salad. People tend to struggle when things exist in multiple naming systems and categories for some reason.

cruegge 6 hours ago||

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think humans are reptiles, phylogenetically. The Synapsida (containing mammals) and Sauropsida (containing reptiles) are sibling groups inside the Amniota.

Tagbert 3 hours ago|||

AFAIK - Synapsida were originally termed mammal-like reptiles before the Amniota group was applied.

adammarples 2 hours ago|||

You're probably right I'm no expert

metronomer 8 hours ago|||

Agree. Latour's got neat arguments too (commenting on Pandora's Hope)

buildsjets 6 hours ago||

As an unusual tree I’ve always liked the Dawn Redwood, Metasequoia glyptostroboides. It was known only from fossil record and thought extinct until a small grove was found in a mountain valley in China in 1946. There was a wave of popularity and a bunch were planted worldwide, which are now mature and easy to find if you want to see one. They grow well and very quickly in cool to temperate climates. They have little tiny deciduous needle-leaves that don't need to be raked, and grow tall and symmetrical without spreading too wide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasequoia_glyptostroboides

I started 2 sprouts I bought by mail order, after one growing season they were nearly 3 feet tall. I got them mail order from Jonsteen Nursery, they have been specializing in various redwood saplings for many years. https://sequoiatrees.com/

andrenotgiant 3 hours ago|

There are lots of "mature" dawn redwood trees in Princeton NJ - particularly in a specific neighborhood built in the 50s.

It makes sense now that the species was discovered in the 40s

mykowebhn 11 hours ago||

I would say the Eucalyptus tree, planted all over the world but native to Australia, is quite unusual.

Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.

bombcar 10 hours ago||

All I know about them is they're bad railroad ties, and they explode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpH9gBsNEwI

mykowebhn 10 hours ago||

True. Although in their native Australia they grew quite straight. It's the introduced trees that grow not so straight and make bad railroad ties.

In areas where they are introduced, they also become quite invasive by practicing something called alelopathy, whereby they introduce toxins into the soil to prevent competing tree species from taking hold.

While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate.

(I knew my botany studies would come in handy someday. I just never knew when!)

bacheaul 2 hours ago|||

Eucalypt forest fires are bad because the leaves are full of oil and when it's hot, dry and windy, they're extremely flammable and the fire races through the tops of the trees at incredible speeds, and jumps across large fire breaks that appear to be wide enough that they should stop it.

But at the same time the wood is also very dense, so makes great campfire wood, but doesn't burn so much in a forest fire, which is a bit ironic...

awesome_dude 3 hours ago|||

> While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate.

Forgive my ignorance, but I had understood the density of the wood meaning that the trunks of the trees were less likely to burn in a forest fire (which eucalypts encourage by shedding large amounts of dry bark)

helterskelter 9 hours ago|||

It's funny, a neighbor had me cut their eucalyptus down, then it grew back from the stump and I had to cut it again a couple years later. Then I has to cut it again a few years after that. Now it looks like I'm going to have to cut it again soon. It's become a running joke at this point.

Those things are tough, and they grow really fast in the right climate.

helterskelter 7 hours ago||

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culi 5 hours ago||

Which Eucalyptus tree? There are between 700-900 species and they look nothing alike.

See E. grandis, E. tetraptera, E. chartaboma, E. deglupta, E. pulverulenta for examples of diversity

Some are incredibly tall with really smooth skin, some are basically bushes, some have really messy papery bark; some even have rainbow bark! Some have really long leaves while some have extremely short tightly wound round leaves

rigonkulous 1 hour ago||

An unusual tree I remember fondly as a child, is in the Karri forests of south-western Australia[1] .. we'd driven through a wild and stormy afternoon to get to it, a friend of my mother had gotten permission and the cabin key, as it was closed to the public then - and so it was that we were climbing the slippery, seemingly fragile iron posts that ringed its trunk[2] all the way to the top to find ourselves cramped into a fire lookout cabin .. we camped overnight in tight sleeping bags with a cold can of baked beans and yesterdays toast for breakfast, and I will always remember the lissajous swing of the thing, carefully turning the resonance of the wind into a constant figure 8, around and around, sometimes in minute increments gradually widening and slowing .. but every now and then, a big fast sweep would happen on the wind, and the tree would translate it through an odd crack into a bigger leverage, and that sleep that was so close gets pushed just a bit beyond the conscious horizon as one wondered, literally, if the tree was finally going to fall .. after a hundred or so years .. but still, just a few hours later, all is calm, the bush is slowly thawing out, the relentless sun conquers the horizon, the iron rungs dry out, the trees leaves steam in the morning sunrise, this great behemoths strength feeling safer and safer as we take gravitys' step .. and we are just too soon back on the ground and off for some surf out at Yallingup or so ..

A beautiful living thing which my perception of its rythmic swing has lived on with me for decades. Trees are lovely.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucalyptus_diversicolor

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloucester_Tree

nickvec 55 minutes ago||

For those curious, the world's tallest known living tree is Hyperion in Redwood National Park at 381.3 feet (116.22 meters). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperion_(tree)

jvm___ 7 hours ago||

Since we're talking trees. Only trees that grow in an area with distinct warm/cold cycles have rings, tropical trees don't and the only way to tell the age of most tropical trees is to have planted it yourself

marcosdumay 6 hours ago||

Trees that grow in areas with wet/dry cycles also have rings. And since most of the trees from permanently-wet areas also have some kind of annual or semi-annual cycle, I'd guess the ringless ones are a rare exception everywhere.

addaon 7 hours ago|||

Wouldn’t a tree without rings still reasonably capture the atmospheric C13:C12 ratio as it grows? Or is the carbon motility within the trunk too high, or the ratio differences too small, to sample a bit near the core and use the ratio there as an age indicator?

pvaldes 3 hours ago|||

Palms and Bamboo are technically "very big weeds". They are more related with grasses than with pines and never have rings. Bananas are also just giant herbs.

So Monocots don't have rings. Anything else that is a tree in a tropical forest has rings. It does not matter where they grow. The rings are smaller in slow growing species, and are different structurally in conifers, but this is all.

imrozim 7 hours ago||

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temp0826 5 hours ago||

One of my favorite trees is Couroupita guianensis, known by a few other names (ayahuma, cannonball tree). When mature the trunks grow some beautiful flowers that can cover the trunk (wiki link has a few good pics). Native to South America, it's a revered tree in Amazonian plant shamanism (all parts of the plant can be used medicinally; spiritually it is one of the big ones, an entire school of its own). It made its way to India in the 1800s where it holds a lot of renown and importance now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couroupita_guianensis

pvaldes 3 hours ago|

Superb flowers but very dangerous to stay under the cannonball tree.

smusamashah 13 hours ago||

The traveller tree looked the most interesting, like a peacock's feather.

https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2017/12/12/the-travel...

pvaldes 3 hours ago|

Big herb. Not really a woody plant.

nvalis 13 hours ago||

Related and also interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_individual_trees

ks2048 7 hours ago|

I was in Brazil for the first time last year and was very impressed with the trees.