The heartbeat of a tree

pantheraba

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I just saw this come thru FaceBook...link below...the website contains a graph that is interesting:

https://returntonow.net/2018/04/29/trees-have-a-heartbeat-scientists-discover/

Until now, scientists thought water moved through trees by osmosis, in a somewhat continuous manner.

Now they?ve discovered the trunks and branches of trees are actually contracting and expanding to ?pump? water up from the roots to the leaves, similar to the way our heart pumps blood through our bodies.

The only difference between our pulse and a tree?s is a tree?s is much slower, ?beating? once every two hours or so, and instead of regulating blood pressure, the heartbeat of a tree, regulates water pressure.

?We?ve discovered that most trees have regular periodic changes in shape, synchronized across the whole plant ? which imply periodic changes in water pressure,? Andr?s Zlinszky of Aarhus University in the Netherlands told New Scientist.

In his 2017 study, Zlinszky and his colleague Anders Barfod used terrestrial laser scanning to monitor 22 tree species to see how the shape of their canopies changed.

The measurements were taken in greenhouses at night to rule out sun and wind as factors in the trees? movements.

In several of the trees, branches moved up and down by about a centimeter or so every couple of hours.

Here is the changing of movement charted in a magnolia tree.
Here?s the change of movement charted in a magnolia tree. (Photo: Andr?s Zlinszky/Twitter)

After studying the nocturnal tree activity, the researchers came up with a theory about what the movement means. They believe the motion is an indication that trees are pumping water up from their roots. It is, in essence, a type of ?heartbeat.?

Zlinszky and Barfod explain their theory in their newest study in the journal Plant Signaling and Behavior.

?In classical plant physiology, most transport processes are explained as constant flows with negligible fluctuation in time,? Zlinszky told New Scientist. ?No fluctuations with periods shorter than 24 hours are assumed or explained by current models.?

But the researchers still don?t fully understand how the ?pumping? motion works. They suggest maybe the trunk gently squeezes the water, pushing it upwards through the xylem, a system of tissue in the trunk whose main job is to transport water and nutrients from roots to shoots and leaves.

In 2016, Zlinszky and his team released another study demonstrating that birch trees ?go to sleep? at night.

The researchers believe the dropping of birch branches before dawn is caused by a decrease in the tree?s internal water pressure. With no photosynthesis at night to drive the conversion of sunlight into simple sugars, trees likely conserve energy by relaxing branches that would otherwise be angled towards the sun.

These birch movements are circadian, following the day-night cycle.

Their new discovery is something entirely different, they say, because the movements happen at much shorter intervals.
 
Gary... Thanks so much. If true: this will revolutionize everything. Dang. Yer the man fer digging this up. You think you know something... ya know??? Turns out... this whole time, my stupid little ISA Arborist Certification workbook is horribly out of date.
 
Thanks for sharing; I'll pass that on to the rest of the crew.
(One aside, is it the forum that can't parse typographer's curly quotes? It always replaces them with question marks when you paste something in...)
 
I'm not sure what that glitch is. A couple other members have the same problem.

Do you post from a phone?
 
Good article, Gary.
I have already read about it in my forestry magazine.
I don't know why they placed arhus university in the Netherlands, it is in Denmark, and both of those guys are Danish.
 
Sweet !
It's a beat, but just not by heart. That's a cyclic mechanism during the root's activity.
Work hard for a while, then slow down to recover. Pumping is an active process and uses the stored energy. Like our muscles.

And yes, they do breath by the leaves, but by the bark too (twigs, limbs, trunk and roots).
 
Anyone who has tapped Maple Trees has seen the sun's work on the trunk and branches , causes the increased circulation and uptake at the roots.
 
This brings up a couple points I find frustrating. There is no open access to the actual research paper on the mentioned article. This has become a "thing" in the last few years. I don't like getting bombarded with others' opinions of a study without having read it myself. I have read far too many papers that bear almost no resemblance to those opinions.

The other point is, why do scientists feel compelled to give explanations for things, that clearly, they don't understand. Theorized conclusions get picked up and used as citations in future papers, even if they were later proved to be wrong. This in no way helps us with our quest to understand.

I am perfectly OK with just knowing the fact that trees move far more as living organisms than we thought without anthropomorphizing that movement. This earlier article shows some of the different ways that trees move, also with lots of guessing as to why.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2017.01814/full
 
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  • #15
I agree, DMc....I was hoping for footnotes, citations and dug a bit but no joy. Maybe someone has more time than me to track the research down.
 
Gary, the paper I linked is penned by the same author, Andras Zlinszky, using the same equipment. As far as I can tell, the article you linked appears to be a continuation of this research.
 
Gary, you mentioned osmosis where I believe it's capillary action and possibly vacuum from evaporation.
 
I watched a show last night, My Passion for Trees. Not great but a few interesting bits in it.

This worked for me to download it but maybe not for everyone.:/: https://ihavenotv.com/judi-dench-my-passion-for-trees


They were listening to the water movement.

judi.jpg

Nice old Yew.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YCQ62deoq_8" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
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  • #21
Great share, Steve. 1600 years old...always in that same place. The world moves around the tree.
 
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