Underground, trees are intimately connected. How best to think about the living stump? Is it a vampiric parasite that sustains its undead existence by leeching the supplies of its fellow trees? Is it a beneficial partner that extends the root network of those other kauri in exchange for water? Is it even an individual entity anymore, or just a part of its neighbors? Without chlorophyll to harness the sun’s energy and make its own food, is it really much of a plant, or something more like a fungus or an animal-an organism that gets its nutrients from other living things? “I think this is really exciting,” says Franciska de Vries of the University of Amsterdam. But at least for now, it’s not going to die, either.

It will never green again, never make cones or seeds or pollen, never unfall, never reclaim its towering verticality. They are hydraulically coupled: The water flowing through the full-size trees also drives water through the stump, keeping it alive. Leuzinger and Bader eventually showed that the stump is connected to one or more of the kauri trees around it, probably via its roots. All appearances to the contrary, it’s still alive. He saw that even though it had no leaves, stems, or greenery of any kind, it did still contain living tissue-and when he knocked on the stump, it sounded different from deadwood. “Everyone would have walked past it for years.”īut when Leuzinger saw the stump, on a walk with fellow botanist Martin Bader, his head turned. “It doesn’t look spectacular at all,” says Sebastian Leuzinger of the Auckland University of Technology. Nor did anyone pay attention when the remnant of its trunk rotted away, leaving behind a stump that’s barely even a stump-a chair-size, hollowed-out half cylinder, sticking up from the middle of a hiking trail, leafless and apparently dead. At some point, a kauri tree fell in a New Zealand forest, and no one noticed.

Eco global survival tree stump?