Ghost Redwoods

[prairiegarden]

Not sure if this belongs here, but I found the article fascinating,  had no idea there were such things to start out with. www.sfgate.com/news/article/The-mystery-of-the-ghost-trees-may-be-solved-9917641.php

[steev]

Sort of a plant "Sin-Eater".

[philagardener]

The problem with their theory is that if the albino plants concentrate heavy metals in a sacrificial way, when they lose their needles those toxins are simply released back into the soil from whence they came.

[prairiegarden]

That'd be the way they ensure they or their offspring always have a job. it's a conundrum.

Perhaps they neutralize the metals in some way? In the " Greening the Desert video Lawton talks about how astonished the ag people were that within a few months Lawton et al were able to grow fruit bearing figs in soil that was basically sterile from being heavily salted fron ag chemicals and fertilizers. They thought Lawton must have washed the salt through, further down into the soil. Instead ( he didn't have the water to do that even if he had wanted to) it appeared as though the soil microbes etc from the mulch, plant material and compost,  had bound it up in some way which made the chemical salts inaccessible to the plants. Maybe something like that?

[steev]

I think the deal is that the albinos sequester the toxins that the normals have already ingested, allowing the normals to continue growing relatively unimpeded by that toxin, not that the toxin is removed from the ecosystem as a whole; think a sump-pump that keeps your basement from flooding (except that it stores the water in an expandable tank, rather than sending it elsewhere); so long as the albino gets nutrients for growth, its storage capacity increases.

We need something to do this sort of thing with nuclear waste, rather than putting it in steel drums and dumping it in the (corrosive) ocean, not that we continue to do that (do we?); what DO we do with nuclear waste, these days? Actually, there prolly isn't much nuclear waste, since nuclear plants are so much cleaner than coal-fired plants, right? How long does it take to compost nuclear waste, anyway, if you fork it over every couple of weeks? Do we have enough Deltas to handle that?