The world is filled with a huge variety of different types of plants, animals, and other organisms. Some of them are tiny, others are huge. Some of them have very short lifespans, others live for a very long time. It is incredible how much diversity has evolved over the millennia, and when researchers look for organisms that fall on the extreme side of things, they can learn a lot.

So, when a researcher learned about a massive organism in Utah that has been around for way longer than humans, he was intrigued. He studied this organism and published his findings in preprint on bioRxiv.

The organism is named Pando, which translates to “I Spread” and that is exactly what it does. It is located in Utah and has so far spread across 42.6 hectares (105.3 acres) of the Fishlake National Forest, and it is still going strong. The organism itself is the quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides), and the reason it is able to get so big is because it reproduces asexually via cloning.

To the average person, this would just look like a large forest of trees, but in reality, it is one connected and constantly cloning organism.

As more and more clones are made, the organism grows. The study found that this particular organism is made up of more than 47,000 stems all created and connected together.

Such a massive organism is impressive on its own, but then when the researcher found that it is also very old. Its genetic data suggests that this one organism has been around for anywhere from 16,000 to 80,000 years, and it seems to be in good health, so it will likely be here much longer.

When most people think of clones, they assume that each clone is genetically identical, which is kind of true. Unlike sexual reproduction, which combines the genes from two partners, cloning simply makes copies of its own genes. There can still be genetic variation that develops, however, which allows the organism to slowly evolve.

William Ratcliff is an evolutionary biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, and a co-author of the study. This study is one of the first and only done on this organism, which was something of a surprise and disappointment to Ratcliff. In a statement, he explained:

“It’s kind of shocking to me that there hasn’t been a lot of genetic interest in Pando already, given how cool it is. I would love to make a call for people to work on these kinds of organisms.”

He and his team collected root, bark, branch, and leaf samples from the organism in multiple different places. They then put those pieces through DNA analysis and genome sequencing. They also looked at the DNA and genes of unrelated quaking aspens that they could use for comparisons. Study co-author Rozenn Pineau is a plant evolutionary geneticist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. He talked about what they found:

“You would expect that the trees that are spatially close are also closer genetically. But this is not exactly what we find. We found a spatial signal, but that is much weaker than what we expected.”

Further study on this unique organism could help them to learn more about how organisms that reproduce through cloning also evolve over time, and what type of limitations (if any) they have when it comes to how long they can live and how big they can get.

If you think that’s impressive, check out this story about a “goldmine” of lithium that was found in the U.S. that could completely change the EV battery game.