If you are asked, “What is the biggest living thing on Earth?” you would likely say, “The blue whale.” Weighing in at 150 tons and the size of four double-decker buses lined up, it’s an enormous behemoth—an emperor of the seas. But the emperor has been recently dethroned. Because it is no longer recognized as the biggest organism on Earth—Pando is.
Pando is a male quaking aspen tree and its 47,000 genetically identical clones, all sharing a common root system in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah. It covers 107 acres, weighs 6,615 tons in total, and is at least 10,000 years old. Aspen propagate through sexual reproduction when conditions are unfavourable—the seeds can move, but the trees can’t. However, if the conditions remain favourable, they just keep on growing asexually in the same place by cloning. The ice sheet never reached Utah in the last Ice Age so Pando could be almost a million years old.