07-04-2016, 01:13 PM
quote:
Originally posted by terracore
The American chestnut was also around for millions of years, and occupied a much larger land area (over 200 million acres). The fastest-growing hardwood, it was the main forest tree of the Eastern US, and what we made ships, houses, furniture, flooring, etc out of until a blight imported from an Asian ornamental chestnut species came in and wiped them all out. The only survivors are a few tiny areas that never got the blight, and some infected, disfigured sickly trees. Over a hundred years of selective breeding has yet to yield a resistant tree.
Hopefully, the Ohia do better.
One of the things that doomed the American Chestnut was their high commercial value, as the blight took hold loggers went out and cut every American Chestnut they could find in a very short time. So virtually no live trees were left, creating a genetic bottle neck even smaller than the one the disease was creating. There were so few trees left from which resistant trees could arise that the American Chestnut had no chance. If native chestnut hadn't been "harvested" so quickly there might have been a chance for a population of resistant chestnuts to get a toehold, but virtually all the trees were cut down before that got a chance to happen.
If anyone wants an example of everything NOT to do to stop the spread of ROD, the Hilo-Keaau highway clearing project is a textbook case. When I commuted through HPP to Hilo everyday I was watching acre after acre of Ohia dying, then I would get on the highway and along with half of Hawaii county I would drive past the highway clearing project. There was no effort made to reduce the spread of ROD along that corridor, instead trees were bulldozed into piles, the piles of dead trees and dirt were constantly being pushed around, no dead trees were covered as recommended, and there are still many dead standing Ohias in the median today.