Superlative

Mago National Park is an astoundingly beautiful place, where morning fog gives way to spectacular vistas, and acacia trees are playgrounds for birds and baboons, the occasional python, and a small group of park rangers who have, in recent years, been losing a war against elephant poachers in southwest Ethiopia.

In the fall of 2017 Mago’s game warden, who had asked park rangers for a census of the elephants in the park, invited me to join a foot patrol with a ranger named Kere Ayke, a member of the Kara tribe of the South Omo River Valley. Our hike began before dawn at a campsite along a rapid, muddy river, and twined through the mountains and valleys of the northeast quadrant of the park. But even before we’d left, Ayke was laughing off the task as rather pointless.

“There are elephants,” he told me as we waded through the thick and thorny bush. “We know because we still see their tracks sometimes. But we haven’t seen them in years. None of us have.”

Sure enough, on that day we saw kudu, waterbuck, dik-dik, baboons, and guinea fowl. At one point something big and dark and gray seemed to slink into the bush 100 yards ahead of us or so, causing the treetops to tremble, but by the time we caught up it was gone, a ghost in the forest. We walked for miles, then miles more, on a route where the world’s largest animals used to roam freely, and saw nothing more than trampled grass and hubcap-sized holes in the mud.

There are places in this world—some not far south from Mago even—in which elephants live in relative safety and where their numbers are stable or even growing. But that isn’t the case in South Omo.

“The ones who are left, the survivors, are hiding,” Ayke said. “They are terrified.”

Back at the ranger station, conservation officer Demelash Delelegn told me why. Pulling an old ledger from the drawer of his rickety desk, and opening its yellowing pages to a hand-drawn spreadsheet, Delelegn released a sigh that seemed much too big for his slight frame.

“This is my very own handwriting from 1997,” he said. “You see here? We found almost 200 elephants in Mago then.”

That’s how many they physically saw, Delelegn told me. Working from those numbers, the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society estimated there could have been as many as 575 elephants in Mago at that time.¹ By 2014 the estimated number, based on new surveys, had fallen to about 170. Still, Delelegn said, even a population that small, if properly protected, could grow.

“But it wasn’t protected,” he said. “We didn’t do anything at all.”

“So how many are there now?” I asked.

Delelegn’s head dropped. “Not many,” he said, tears welling in his eyes. “Not many at all.”

He couldn’t bring himself to even hazard a guess at a specific number. It was just too hard.

Outside his office, over a game of bottlecap checkers, I asked Ayke and his fellow scouts how many elephants they thought the most recent census would find.

“Maybe fifteen?” Ayke guessed. The other scouts nodded.

“There were 170 just a few years ago and now there are fifteen?”

They nodded again.

Mago is surrounded on all sides by tribes including the Kara, Hamar, Mursi, and Ari. The warriors from these tribes have always hunted elephants, though not in tremendous numbers. One elephant goes a long way, after all.

But when the government sold off tribal lands and permitted foreign investors to open factories in the region, some members of the tribes rebelled by doing something they’d been told they were no longer allowed to do: They began killing more elephants, trading the ivory for cash and guns.

Delelegn was surprisingly sympathetic. The scouts with whom he works are all drawn from the surrounding tribes. He said the government came and made demands of the tribes and didn’t think of “how to talk to them in right and respectful ways.”

The scouts are helpless to protect the animals. “We have forty-two people to patrol this entire park, which is more than 2,000 square kilometers,” Delelegn said. “We don’t have any trucks. We have very few guns. We have no education or training for this.”

None of this came as a surprise to Nisha Owen, the manager of the Zoological Society of London’s EDGE species program. There aren’t enough game officers in the world to defend the species that need defending, she said. “Ultimately, protecting animals comes down to communicating with people,” she said. “If we do it right we can have a tremendous positive impact, but if we do it wrong we can make things worse.”

To do it right, though, requires understanding. And we got a very late start on that. It wasn’t until 1977, in fact, that anyone thought to bring together a society of researchers around the scientific exploration of African and Asian elephants.²

A review of that community’s work, in the first edition of the journal Elephant, shows just how poorly developed the field was in the 1970s. One zoo reported to the society that it was interested in the interbreeding of two separate species, an African bull and Asian cow—a futile biological enterprise and, today, a conservation anathema.³ A list of “selected recent literature” included references to some more sophisticated scientific explorations, but even that list was thematically dominated by questions related to basic attributes, such as how long elephants live, how much they eat, and where they dwell—all things scientists could have explored decades or even hundreds of years earlier.

Fifteen years after the journal was born, its editor, biologist Jeheskel Shoshani,⁴ was still lamenting just how much very basic information we had yet to gather about elephants. “We have just begun to understand elephant behavior and its role in the ecosystem,” he wrote in Elephants: Majestic Creatures of the Wild, a thoughtful examination of the social, economic, and ecological roles of the world’s largest land animal.⁵

Writing in the foreword to the book, the eminent zoologist Richard Laws marveled at a then-recent finding that elephants communicate over long distances by ultra-low frequencies called infrasound.

It’s not that such a discovery couldn’t have been made during those years; infrasound had, at that point, been detectable by human instrumentation for seventy-five years.⁶ But previously, no one had thought to even try. “There is no doubt,” Laws added, “that there are further significant discoveries to be made.”

Once we really started studying elephants, something became very clear: That was an understatement of gargantuan proportions.

HOW ELEPHANTS ARE LIKE MARTIAL ARTISTS

The African elephant is not so much an outlier as an outcome.

The largest living land mammal could be the poster creature for something called Cope’s Rule. That nineteenth-century postulate, named for paleontologist Edward Cope,⁷ suggests animals in a lineage tend to get bigger over time.⁸

From a long-term perspective, that’s obvious. When life first appeared on this planet, some 4 billion years ago, it arrived in the form of single-celled organisms. By about 230 million years ago, those tiny creatures had evolved into dinosaurs, which ruled the planet for 165 million years to come, gradually getting bigger and bigger until . . .

. . . BOOM . . .

. . . an asteroid delivered a calamitous do-over, leaving very few large creatures on our planet’s surface. The survivors were generally smaller burrowers that were able to wait out the upheaval. And, with those little animals as a launching point, Mother Nature started over again, rebuilding her creations, bigger and bigger with each passing millennium. Today our planet is once again walked upon by monsters. Giraffes and rhinoceroses. Hippopotamuses and elephants.

Cope’s Rule isn’t perfect. And within the vast fossil record it is certainly not hard to identify lineages that have reversed course in response to the conditions of the times and places in which they have lived. Over time, however, animals that don’t die out tend to chunk up again. In this way, plotting the Cope effect would generally give us a chart that looks less like a straight line than an inverted roller coaster—up and down and up and down, but ever more up over time.

Like humans and every other placental mammal, elephants likely evolved from a furry-tailed, insect-eating, rat-sized animal resembling a long-nosed shrew and weighing in at about 8 ounces.⁹ The following epochs gave us the 35-pound phosphatherium, which looked like a cross between a gerbil and a hippo. Later there was the 1,000-pound phiomia, which had a jutting jaw and thus looked more like a cross between an elephant and Jay Leno. Later still there was the 4,000-pound palaeomastodon, which looked like a modern elephant, but with a shorter trunk and tusks at all four corners of its mouth.

All of these creatures appear to be part of the lineage that gave us today’s African bush elephant, the largest animal to roam the surface of our planet since the dinosaurs left Earth about 65 million years ago. (The largest of the mammoths rivaled their modern cousins in height, but likely fell short of the 15,000-pound weight of the largest African bush bulls.) Among an estimated 6.5 million other terrestrial species on our planet,¹⁰ and the hundreds of millions of creatures that have lived on the Earth’s surface since the last major extinction, the elephant is truly a fantastic beast.

The Darwinian explanation for how tiny animals turn into giant ones over time is fairly commonsensical; it is natural selection at work. Mutations producing a little more size and strength result in individuals better adapted to competing for mates, winning the battle for food, and fighting off predators.

But perhaps the single biggest driver of Cope’s Rule is something so obvious it’s often overlooked. As evolutionary biologist John Bonner once explained to me, “there’s always room at the top.” Smaller animals, he pointed out, must compete with a lot of other animals in a similar niche. But once an animal finds itself at the top of the heap within its biome, Bonner said, “they escape the competition.” Thus, over time, a lot of animals get bigger.

And not just bigger, but different. For as a creature grows, the universal laws governing matter and energy begin to push and pull upon the forces that maintain life. In his book Why Size Matters, Bonner argues size is the driving force for all of biology, including evolution. It’s why elephants look like elephants, rather than really big versions of our common ancestor. They didn’t grow bigger because mutations like long snouts made them more fit, Bonner argues. Rather, such mutations were needed to accommodate their growth.

To explain how this works, Bonner likes to invoke the Brobdingnagians of Jonathan Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships (which you likely know as Gulliver’s Travels). Like Swift’s Lilliputians, who looked precisely like humans but were much smaller, the Brobdingnagians are described as looking just like humans, but standing twelve times taller than we are, or nearly 70 feet tall. But a creature that tall poses a problem of physics, because an increase in height would correspond to an increase in width, which would correspond to an increase in depth. And the area within those dimensions, filled to the brim with tissue and bone, Bonner estimates, would weigh something on the order of 12 or 13 tons.

Supporting that weight wouldn’t be possible on legs simply scaled up from human dimensions. To have any hope of walking, the Brobdingnagians would have to have greatly thickened lower limbs, which Bonner says would give them the appearance of being “victims of advanced elephantiasis of the legs.”¹¹ It’s not just that they wouldn’t look human—they couldn’t look human.

Elephants don’t simply offer us an opportunity to understand the colluding forces of physics and evolution, though. They also have much to teach us when it comes to survival. Because even though they have a lot going for them in that respect, as the most extreme land-dwelling example of Cope’s Rule, they also have a lot going against them.

While evolution seems to drive many creatures, and particularly mammals, to get bigger over time,¹² it also eventually blows the biggest animals off the extinctionary edge—a phenomenon I’ve come to think of as “Cope’s Cliff.” Bigger animals take a lot more food and water to survive from day to day, and are thus more prone to starvation in times of scarcity. They have longer gestation periods and tend to birth single offspring at a time, meaning they don’t replace themselves, let alone grow their numbers, as quickly as smaller animals. As a result, they can’t evolve as quickly in response to changing climates.

It is for reasons like these that we are no longer sharing the Earth with animals like Castoroides, a genus of goliath prehistoric beavers that could reach 7 feet long and weighed more than 250 pounds. Castoroides likely bowed out of existence around 11,000 years ago, along with the genera Glyptodon, an armadillo the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and Megalonyx, a 10-foot-tall sloth. Ahead of all of those genera on the great and lethal leap off Cope’s Cliff was the real Bigfoot—Gigantopithecus, a 10-foot and 1,000-pound fruit-eating ape that lived in what is now southern China.¹³

All huge. All gone now.

So bigger is better—until it isn’t. That’s what makes the world’s largest land animal so special. Elephants have managed to survive both because of and despite their size. Somehow, they’ve successfully balanced upon an evolutionary tightrope strung between their sheer enormity and pressures like cataclysmic environmental changes, hungry predators, and the necessity to evolve. Having come to the precarious edge of Cope’s Cliff, they’ve almost miraculously managed to keep from falling off.

And although elephants are the largest of all extant land animals, every life-form having achieved superlative size among its own lineage has walked a similarly incredible evolutionary path. Giraffes. Giant redwoods. Blue whales. These organisms are evolutionary jujitsu masters—the perfect combination of strength, balance, and fitness. Their size is a clue to us that they have tremendous knowledge to impart about surviving in this world, if we’d only just be willing to study at their enormous feet.¹⁴

WHY ELEPHANT CELLS ARE LIKE EMPATHETIC ZOMBIES

At first phenotypic blush, my friend Zuri and I don’t seem much alike. She has a trunk and I’ve got thumbs. She has crackly gray hide and I’ve got freckled peach skin. She can communicate over long distances via low-pitched rumbles detectable by vibrations in her trunk and feet, and I’ve got text messaging, email, and Twitter. And, not for nothing, there’s the whole size thing: She weighed far more as a 251-pound infant than I’ve ever weighed as an adult.

Physiologically speaking, it might appear as though you couldn’t find another mammal more different from Homo sapiens than Loxodonta africana.

But there’s also a tremendous amount of common ground. Both of our species live unusually long lives for mammals—decades after our last reproduction, a point at which a lot of other animals tend to knock off. We’re both social creatures who live in highly complex communities. We both have relatively big brains, even when adjusted for body size.

And in our genomes? There’s a lot of overlap. About three-quarters of elephant genes have human analogs—and hidden inside all of that shared genetic material is potential for deep understanding.

The genetic coding we share with elephants has been stressed and stretched in all sorts of different ways since our species diverged, but vast sequences in our DNA still perform markedly similar functions. So when we see something an elephant is doing with its genome, it’s not beyond reason that—given the right circumstances—we could do it with ours, too.

One example of this came by way of the legendary biological anthropologist Morris Goodman, a pioneer in the use of DNA to chart the course of evolution. Goodman wanted to know whether the human solution to addressing the needs of big, oxygen-ravenous brains was, in fact, uniquely human at all. After sorting through the genomes of fifteen animals, all of which diverged from one another at vastly different times in the past 310 million years,¹⁵ Goodman realized humans and elephants had both undergone an accelerated period of evolution in our “aerobic energy metabolism” genes, which impact how our mitochondria use oxygen.¹⁶

Here’s the crazy thing: That rapid period of change happened long after humans and elephants broke ranks on the evolutionary tree of life—resulting in a shared genetic trait that evolved separately, and at different times in history, as our two species confronted the common challenge of growing big brains.¹⁷ So it’s not just the traits we shared at the time we diverged that are important—it’s the potential within our genomes for those traits to develop when circumstances require it.

That potential is at the center of the burgeoning field of comparative genomics, and at the heart of the work of pediatric oncologist Josh Schiffman, a childhood cancer survivor who is growing more convinced, every day, that he might be unlocking the secret to curing cancer.

It all started in the summer of 2012, when Schiffman’s beloved dog, Rhody, passed away to histiocytosis, a condition that attacks the cells of skin and connective tissue. “It was the only time my wife has ever seen me cry,” he told me. “Rhody was like our first child.”

Schiffman had heard dogs like his had an elevated risk of cancer, but it wasn’t until after Rhody’s death that he learned just how elevated it was. Bernese mountain dogs who live to the age of ten have a 50 percent risk of dying from cancer.

“Suddenly it dawned on me there was this whole other world, this young field of comparative oncology,” he said, “and I was pulled into the idea of being a pioneer and maybe a leader to help move things along.”

Schiffman had long been intrigued by the fact that size doesn’t appear to correlate to cancer rates—a phenomenon known as “Peto’s Paradox,” named for Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Peto. But when Schiffman took his children on an outing to Utah’s Hogle Zoo—the same place I sometimes go to have lunch with my elephant friend, Zuri—everything came together.

A keeper named Eric Peterson had just finished giving a talk to a crowd of visitors, mentioning in passing that the zoo’s elephants have been trained to allow the veterinary staff to take small samples of blood from a vein behind their ears. As the crowd dispersed, an angular, excited man approached him.

“I’ve got a strange question,” Schiffman said.

“We’ve heard them all,” Peterson replied.

“OK then—how do I get me some of that elephant blood?” Schiffman asked.

Peterson contemplated calling security. Instead, after a bit of explanation from Schiffman, the zookeeper told the inquisitive doctor he’d look into it. Two and a half months later, the zoo’s institutional review board gave its blessing to Schiffman’s request.

Things moved fast after that.

Cancer develops in part because cells divide. During each division the cells must make a copy of their DNA, and once in a while, for various reasons, those copies include a mistake. The more cells divide, the greater the odds of an error, and the more prone an error is to be duplicated again and again.

And elephant cells? Those things are dividing like crazy. Based on the number of cell divisions elephants need to get from Zuri’s size when we met to the size she is now, in just a few short years, it stands to reason they should get lots of cancer. Yet they almost never do.

“Going from 300 pounds as a calf to more than 10,000 pounds, gaining three-plus pounds a day, they’re growing so quickly, so big and so fast—baby elephants really shouldn’t make it to adulthood,” Schiffman said. “They should have 100 times the cancer. Just by chance alone, elephants should be dropping dead all over the place.” Indeed, he said, they should probably die of cancer before they’re even old enough to reproduce. “They should be extinct!”

Already, comparative oncologists suspected the exceptionally low rate of cancer in elephants had something to do with p53, a gene whose human analog is a known cancer suppressor. Most humans have one copy—two alleles—of the gene. Those with an inherited condition known as Li–Fraumeni syndrome, however, have just one allele—and a nearly 100 percent chance of getting cancer. The logical conclusion is more p53 alleles mean a better chance of staving off cancer. And elephants, it turns out, have twenty of them.

The big find that came from Schiffman’s exploration of the elephant blood he got at the zoo, though, was not just that there were more of these genes in elephants, but that the genes behaved a little bit differently, too.

In humans, the gene’s first approach for suppressing tumor growth is to try to repair faulty cells—the sort that cause cancer. So, at first, Schiffman’s team assumed having more p53 genes meant elephants had bigger repair crews. With the goal of watching those crews in action, the researchers exposed the elephant cells to radiation, causing DNA damage. But they noticed that, instead of trying to fix what was broken, the elephant cells seemed to grow something of a conscience.

To understand this, it’s helpful to think about how you’d respond in a zombie apocalypse. Of course you’d fight long and hard to keep from being infected, right? But if a zombie was about to chomp down on your arm, and there was nothing you could do to stop it, and if you had but one bullet remaining in your gun—and a few moments to consider what you might do to your fellow humans as a part of the legion of the undead—what would you do?

That’s what elephant cells do, too. Under the directive of p53, mutated cells don’t put up a fight. Upon recognizing the inevitability of malignant mutation, they take their own lives in a process known as apoptosis.

And they don’t just do this for one kind of cancer. The p53 gene apparently programs cells to do this in response to all kinds of malignantly mutated cells in elephants—a finding that flies in the face of the conventional assumption that there is no one singular cure for the complex group of disorders we call cancer.¹⁸

When I first met Schiffman in 2016, he was brimming with excitement about the potential elephants have to help us understand cancer. He was also very cautious not to suggest he was anywhere near a cure, nor that he ever would be.

Just a few years later, though, Schiffman was speaking openly about his intention to rid the world of cancer. And, to that end, what’s happening in his lab is encouraging, to say the least.

He and his team have been injecting cancer cells with a synthetic version of a p53 protein modeled on the DNA he’s drawn from Zuri and other elephants from around the world. Viewed on time-lapse video, the results are unmistakable and amazing.

Breast cancer. Gone.

Bone cancer. Gone.

Lung cancer. Gone.

One by one, each type of cancer cell falls victim to zombie-cell hara-kiri, shriveling and then exploding, and leaving nothing behind to mutate.¹⁹ Schiffman is now working with Avi Schroeder, an expert in nanomedical delivery systems at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, to create tiny delivery vehicles to take the synthetic elephant protein into mammalian tumors.

If this was all the benefit we ever derived from studying elephants, it would be plenty.

But it’s not. Not at all.

WHY ELEPHANT AROUSAL IS GOOD FOR OTHER ANIMALS

It was a summer day at the Oakland Zoo, one of very few accredited animal parks caring for bull elephants in the United States.

There were dozens of visitors milling about near the elephant exhibit that afternoon but, up to that point, few of them were really looking at the twenty-three-year-old beast named Osh—not until he ambled, huge head bobbing up and down, closer and closer, and came to rest in the corner of his pen nearest to where visitors could stand. From there, the young bull’s enormity was appreciable, breathtaking. At the time he stood 10 feet, 9 inches tall and weighed 13,000 pounds. His legs were as big around as many of the trees lining his pen. His eyes were gleaming amber and his ears were like beating aortas; as they flapped, they clapped against his shoulders and sent great clouds of dust into the air. His rumble had the cadence of a cooing pigeon and the octave of a distant train.

The visitors watched with giggles and sighs and oh-my-Gods as Osh lifted his trunk over the fence and peered into an adjoining pen where the female elephants were kept. But then, from the gallery, came the gasps of horrified parents and the quick shuffling of children’s feet as they were turned and pulled away by their adult companions, as Osh’s penis appeared between his back legs, his erection growing larger as he stared at the cows.

That Osh was clearly interested in his female companions was a good sign. It had been just over a year since his first musth, a rutting period when male elephants become uncharacteristically aggressive, and his keepers were cautious but eager to get him in a pen with the cows. Every fertile new bull, after all, offers an opportunity to add to the diversity of genes in the captive population, a collection of animals zoo advocates argue are vital for species conservation.

At that point, in 2017, artificial collection of Osh’s semen had proven unproductive owing to urine contamination. Colleen Kinzley, the zoo’s animal care director, told me she was hoping a more “let nature take its course” approach might change the reproductive dynamics, but Osh needed to take the lead on that.²⁰

The challenges Kinzley and her staff were facing with Osh aren’t unusual. As wild populations of elephants continue to plummet, the Association of Zoos & Aquariums has pressed its members to make breeding a priority, but captive breeding of just about any wild species is replete with challenges. Overcoming those challenges takes creativity, patience, luck, experience—and money.

We might have gotten a late start on studying them, but these days hundreds of scientific reports are published each year on wild and captive elephants, with many of the studies focused on discoveries about breeding and reproduction. Among the leaders in this field is Wendy Kiso, who in the mid-2010s was a researcher at the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation in Polk City, Florida, where dozens of former performing pachyderms were sent after the circus shut down its elephant act. Among other findings, Kiso has discovered novel ways to help ensure elephant sperm remains viable after freezing. Diluting the semen in an egg yolk–based solution, it turns out, helps in this regard.²¹ Kiso and her team have also discovered that variability in the quality of sperm in Ringling’s elephant herd can be predicted by an elephant’s levels of lactotransferrin, an antibacterial protein found in all mammals that helps transfer iron into cells.

These sorts of studies can seem esoteric. Here’s why they’re not: Just as we can learn a lot from elephants when it comes to fighting cancer in humans, we can learn a lot about how to save other animals by what we now understand about preserving pachyderms. The research Kiso’s team has conducted has been used again and again as the building blocks for scientists studying—and seeking to save—other animals, including those that don’t command nearly as much affection, public fascination, or funding as elephants do.²²

There are more than 40,000 species on the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species. Thousands have been declared “critically endangered” and there are likely thousands of others that would garner that designation with an updated population assessment. Very few of these animals have captured the hearts and reached into the pocketbooks of people around the world in the way elephants have.

One of the key struggles in saving any endangered animal is preserving genetic diversity. That’s why conservationists have been working on developing genome resource banks—repositories of sperm, embryos, tissue, blood, and DNA that serve as an “insurance policy” that there is enough genetic material, from as many different sources as possible, to give us the best chance of saving animals on the brink of extinction.

Much of what we know about preserving the sperm of endangered animals has come from what we’ve learned from the billions of dollars we’ve spent on research into human fertility, and from livestock heavily bred for reproductive success. If it works for H. sapiens and it works for Bos taurus, we’ve generally assumed it’ll work for everything else. Kiso’s team showed that wasn’t the case. Even species as closely related as Elephas maximus and L. africana (which diverged about 7.5 million years ago) needed to be treated differently. Another of their studies, for instance, demonstrated the different ways the sperm of Asian and African elephants responds to various freezing techniques.²³ Up to that point, the sperm of the largest and second-largest land animals in the world was generally handled the same.

Two years after that paper was published, prominent biologist Pierre Comizzoli, the director of the influential Smithsonian Consortia, used the Ringling team’s findings to help make the case for investment in reproductive research on other animals. Wild ones. Endangered ones. Ones that often have a lot more in common with fellow threatened species than people and cows do. Despite the fact that cryopreservation is a vital part of international conservation efforts, Comizzoli lamented, “virtually all other species . . . have gone unstudied.”²⁴

Now that’s starting to change, thanks to the elephant’s very big coattails. And that’s not the only way in which animals that have captured our collective fancy with their immense size are changing long-held scientific assumptions.

WHY ALMOST EVERYTHING WE KNOW ABOUT GIRAFFES IS WRONG

It was the trademark example of Lamarckian inheritance—the theory, pushed forward in 1801 by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that more frequent and continuous use of any specific characteristic would gradually strengthen that characteristic, pushing an animal toward “the limit of its development.”²⁵

“In places where the soil is nearly always arid and barren, it is obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them,” Lamarck wrote in 1809 of giraffes and their exceptionally long necks. “It has resulted that the animal’s fore-legs have become longer than its hind legs, and that its neck is lengthened.”

Many of the ideas Lamarck espoused were supplanted as Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories took hold following the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, and much of what did remain en vogue about “use and disuse inheritance” was abandoned when Mendelian inheritance became the core of genetic theory in the early 1900s.²⁶ But the giraffes-got-tall-to-reach-the-leaves idea stuck around—with Darwin himself giving the hypothesis an added boost. Giraffes, he wrote, were “beautifully adapted for browsing on the higher branches of trees.”²⁷

These days, even if they don’t know the difference between Lamarckism and Darwinism, most people will tell you that giraffes, however they evolved to be the tallest animal in the world, did so in order to reach the leaves on tall trees.

There’s just one problem with that theory: There isn’t much evidence to support it.

Back in 1991, Lynne Isbell, a veteran field researcher who is something of a specialist at making observations other scientists have missed, was among the first people to note that giraffes don’t often use their full height to feed. Most of the time, in fact, they bend down to eat.²⁸ That’s an observation that was later confirmed by other scientists, who noted that in the dry seasons—when feeding competition should be most intense and thus offer the greatest selective pressure—giraffes are even more likely to eat from the same low shrubs as competing browsers.²⁹

Isbell said the A-causes-B way we tend to think about evolution is, quite simply, too simplistic. “One of the things I love is selective pressures,” she told me, stressing the “s” in “pressures” to emphasize its plurality. “The environments in which animals live and in which they evolve are exceptionally complicated, so there are always multiple selective pressures going on at once.”

While it’s definitely possible that leaf-reaching was one of many factors that led giraffes to their superlative status, scientists like Isbell have offered a lot of compelling evidence that it wasn’t the main factor, let alone the only one, as so many people have been taught.

Giraffes don’t just use their long necks and legs to eat, after all. They also use their necks to fight. Males use their thick skulls as battering rams; the longer and heavier the neck, the more advantage a bull has when competing with rivals for cows. And they use those long legs to kick and run, two key survival skills for the fight-or-flight realities of life in the midst of some of the most ruthless carnivores on the planet.

Rather than being the product of simplistic cause-and-effect evolution, giraffes’ superlative height is more likely the result of a perfect storm of selective pressures—the ability to reach food, yes, but also the competition for sex, the need to outrun predators, and the ability to stand and fight when necessary to protect themselves and their calves. All of this would help explain why, when scientists at Penn State University compared several giraffe genomes to the genomes of the okapi—a much-shorter giraffe cousin whose hindquarters resemble a zebra—they found seventy different genes that had undergone significant changes in the relatively short 11 million years since the two lineages diverged.³⁰

Genetic sequencing didn’t just lend evidence to the idea that giraffes evolved to be tall as the result of myriad selective pressures, though. It also put a hole in what now appears to be a foundational misunderstanding about the species—namely, that it’s a species.

Axel Janke understands why people were reluctant to believe him when he first suggested that we might have to change the way we think about giraffes. The pioneering geneticist said he didn’t even believe it himself, at first, when the DNA samples he tested from giraffes throughout Africa showed a surprisingly vast genetic diversity.³¹ “I said, ‘Something is odd here,’” he recalled. “I didn’t suspect different species at this point, but when we analyzed the data with different methods, you could see four groups.”

Even then, he said, he was hesitant to suggest something so clearly contradictory to the conventional wisdom about the giraffe “because—come on—everybody knows giraffes,” he said. “If you ask a four-year-old what a giraffe is, she can explain it to you.”

“Yeah, it’s the tall one,” I said.

“Precisely,” Janke said. “Everybody knows that. But not much else . . . and when we think of these animals based on one attribute, we tend to miss things.”

The decision to classify giraffes as a single species came in the 1700s, and was made unilaterally by a guy who had never actually seen a live one and who either didn’t realize or didn’t much care that giraffes come with a tremendous variety of body shapes, patterns, behavioral characteristics, geographic ranges, and mating behaviors. That guy, though, was Carl Linnaeus, the father of biological taxonomy. And the figurative shelves he created for the 12,000 species of plants and animals he classified have proved to be quite sturdy, even sacred. Even though it’s clearly an imperfect system, and substitutes have been proposed, we continue to use the binomial system of classification Linnaeus developed more than 250 years ago.³²

Yet what Janke discovered, when he put Linnaeus’s single-species assumption to the genetic test, is that various groups of giraffes are as different from one another as polar bears are from grizzly bears. He’s identified four separate species, including the southern giraffe, the reticulated giraffe, the northern giraffe, and the Masai giraffe, the latter of which is the tallest of the four species and thus the tallest mammal in the world. Janke told me he thinks a genetic case might be made for other giraffe groups to be considered separate species as well, but that will take more time and research.

Now, if you’re thinking, “But wait—can’t these different groups of giraffes interbreed?” then you’re not alone. One of the most common beliefs about speciation is that it’s all about fertility. It’s not.

The definition of species most scientists use, at least when it comes to organisms that reproduce sexually, comes from the taxonomist Ernst Mayr, who suggested that speciation comes from reproductive isolation.³³ While that isolation can certainly come from biological barriers, it can also come from geographic or behavioral barriers.

And the different groups of giraffes are indeed isolated. Very isolated. Janke said he knows of no hybrids in the wild and only one case in a zoo. Yes, two giraffes from different groups can potentially produce fertile offspring but, as the different giraffe populations evolved, they didn’t—not for more than a million years. That’s further back in time than the point at which most species of archaic humans, including Homo neanderthalensis and Homo rhodesiensis, split from our common ancestor.

All of this could fundamentally impact the way we approach giraffe conservation, because even though myriad factors affect whether an animal is declared to be endangered, sheer numbers are a big part of the calculus. As recently as 2010, the IUCN declared the giraffe to be a (single) species of “least concern” when it comes to the likely danger of extinction. When you split the 100,000 remaining wild giraffe into four separate species, though, things begin to look a lot more dire, especially since those groups aren’t split equally. The northern giraffe, for instance, has just a few thousand individuals remaining in the wild, and those animals are dispersed in groups across thousands of miles of Africa. Old assumptions die hard, though, and as of 2018 the union still hadn’t shifted its assessment that, as a singular species, the giraffe was vulnerable, but not endangered.³⁴

The genetic evidence is compelling, so I think the union will change its tune—and soon. And, once that happens, there may be greater reason for hope for all of the different giraffes. Because the union’s listings carry moral and legal weight in nations around the world.

And when we get together as an international community we can have a really big impact on really big things.

WHY BLUE WHALES ARE SO HARD TO RESEARCH

I saw the breach off the port bow, perhaps 200 meters to the east of the boat.

“Whale,” I said, pointing through a foggy windshield. That was all I could manage, for I’d never seen anything like it.

I served in the US Navy when I was younger, and circumnavigated the globe on the USS Nimitz. But aircraft carriers are awfully big ships, and there were days and even weeks when I did not get topside, the hours marked by bells and duty changes instead of sunrises and sunsets. Occasionally, in the middle of the night, I’d sneak onto the aft deck and marvel at the bioluminescent trail our enormous ship left in its wake, a magical gift from some of the smallest inhabitants of the ocean, but I had never seen the biggest.

Twenty years later, on a much smaller vessel in California’s Monterey Bay, I was making my first acquaintance with members of the family Balaenopteridae.

“Is it a humpback?” I asked my guide, marine biologist Nancy Black, as a huge gray tail suddenly appeared out of the water, slapping the surface, again and again, with such force we could hear it in her boat’s cabin.

“It is,” she said.

“It’s enormous,” I replied, still trying to manage my awe.

“It’s just a little guy,” she laughed. “Just a playful puppy.”

Black’s nonchalance was understandable, I suppose. She’s been at this for thirty years. There are few people in the world who have seen more whales than she has. And this encounter followed, by just a week, a visit to that same bay by the biggest of the sea giants. One of Black’s crew members was flying a drone on that day, and the overhead image of a blue whale, surfacing near a watercraft less than half its size, was something to behold.

As is the case for so many extreme creatures, humans got a pretty late start when it comes to scientific inquiry about the biggest of them all. Until the International Whaling Commission’s 1986 ban on whaling—and even after that in some areas of the world—researchers had to compete with hunters to reach the blues. In this respect, we’re fortunate whales weren’t pushed off Cope’s Cliff altogether. It’s a testament to the evolutionary fitness of these masters of our oceans that our centuries-long effort to harpoon as many of them as possible didn’t result in more extinctions.³⁵

And when it comes to Balaenoptera musculus, in particular, that permits us to say something rather extraordinary: We exist on this planet at the same time as the largest animal to ever live.

To fully appreciate how special this is, do what Eric Kirby suggests doing: Take a walk on a football field. A 100-yard gridiron is a graspable stand-in for the 4.5-billion-year history of our planet. If you started on the northwest goal line of Reser Stadium, at Oregon State University, where Kirby teaches geology,³⁶ and started walking southeast from there, you’d be well within the 2-yard line on the opposite end of the field before you got to the place where our modern mountains were born, and standing right about on top of the 1-yard line when you got to the place when whales arrived. By the time you got to the place where blue whales came along, you’d be 3 inches away from the end zone. And within those few remaining inches, Kirby told NPR a few years ago, “if you pluck two hairs out and lay them down on the goal line, that’s about how long we’ve had civilization on our planet.”³⁷

And yet there we are. And there they are, too. What luck.

Well, for us, at least. A century ago, there were hundreds of thousands of blue whales in our oceans. Today there are perhaps 25,000 left. Even as humpbacks and gray whales have recovered from a century of commercial whaling—a true testament to the effectiveness of international cooperation—the blues have lagged behind throughout the world.

There are exceptions, though—places where blue whales are thriving—and that’s what prompted me to go looking for whales on the California coast. Some researchers believe blue whale numbers have rebounded in this area to near-historic levels—a phenomenon that does not appear to be the case with other populations of blues.³⁸ Something happening in California’s coastal waters is bringing the world’s largest animal—all 100 feet and 300,000 pounds of it—back from the brink.

What? That’s not precisely clear. For despite their gargantuan size, blue whales are actually quite hard to find and even harder to research.

That might seem counterintuitive. It’s hard to miss a blue whale, right? But as big as they are, the ocean is so much bigger, and sometimes we forget just how big it is.

If every remaining blue whale in the world gathered together in one area of the ocean’s surface, lining up side by side and nose to tail, they could pack themselves into a few square miles. But the total surface of our ocean is nearly 140 million square miles, and the blue’s territory encompasses most of those waters.

There are places where they’re a bit easier to find, though—if we’re willing to challenge assumptions. That’s what Kirby’s colleague at Oregon State, marine ecologist Leigh Torres, discovered in the South Taranaki Bight, a bay on the southwest coast of New Zealand’s North Island, which is also known as Te Ika-a-Maui. Torres had heard stories about blues in the bay, and lots of Kiwis knew the world’s largest creature could be spotted in the bight, but when Torres began to dig into the scientific literature in the early 2010s, she found no one had so much as confirmed the blues’ presence in the bay. “It was a case of, ‘Oh yeah, they show up there sometimes,’ ” she told me. “But no one knew much more.”

Intrigued, Torres began digging into historic whaling records, studying oceanographic data and examining Taranaki’s plant and animal life. “Everything seemed to point to the idea that the bight wasn’t just a place that blue whales might be found, but that it was really an ideal environment for them,” she said.

There were, at that point, only a few known foraging grounds for blues, places where scientists could go to have any hope of encountering enough whales to conduct reliable research. Vitally, these are often places where the whales get even more protection under international agreements and national laws—places where they could go to make baby blues.

In a 2014 expedition, Torres and her team set out to demonstrate the blues were in the bight. They accomplished that goal easily, and made another discovery in the process: The Taranaki blues were genetically distinct from other blues that frequent New Zealand. And when the team sent photos of more than 150 individual whales to researchers around the world, they learned something even more stunning: None of the animals had ever been identified anywhere else. By way of contrast, almost every other whale that has been identified around New Zealand has been spotted elsewhere in the world.³⁹

Blue whales are typically thought to be the some of the Earth’s greatest nomads, traveling thousands of miles each year in a never-ending quest for food and favorable breeding locations.⁴⁰ The whales Torres and her team identified, though, appeared to spend nearly all of their lives in Taranaki—a finding backed in more recent years by hydrophone recordings establishing the presence of blues in the bight throughout the year.

Thanks to Torres, researchers now have a place to go where they can be almost guaranteed to find the world’s largest animal. And already this has offered us a wealth of new information about creatures that have previously eluded scientists.

One such finding came in 2017 when drone videos captured by Torres’s research collaborator and husband, Todd Chandler, showed Taranaki blue whales feeding on huge patches of krill—and passing up opportunities for smaller bites. In one video, a blue locks onto a cloud of pink crustaceans, rotates sideways and opens its mouth, filling its ballooning gullet. Opening its mouth was like throwing open a parachute: The decision to feast slowed the animal from nearly 7 miles per hour to just 1 mile an hour, a shift that meant the whale would have to exert significant energy in order to bring itself back up to feeding speeds for the next mouthful.

In another video, the same animal begins an almost identical approach on another, smaller patch of krill, but appears to decide at the last moment not to open its mouth, apparently making an energy-versus-calories calculation to wait for a bigger meal.⁴¹

Torres believes blue whales make these choices all the time, and really quickly, based on a number of sensory inputs. Certainly, she said, vision plays a role, but so might smell, sound, and even the “feel” of water being disturbed by thousands of tiny organisms with their flailing antenna, legs, setae, and gills.

Humans—brilliant, brainy creatures we so often believe ourselves to be—are pretty bad at this sort of thing. Engaging one sense often comes at a cost to our other senses.⁴² Whales, on the other hand, appear to have the ability to form a synergistic, rapid-fire-decision-inciting picture from various sensory inputs.⁴³

And why wouldn’t they? We know intelligence is a function of brain size, neocortical surface area, the number of neurons, and the impact of rapid evolution, among other factors. Whales have all of that in spades. Just as we have learned a lot about ourselves from studying the world’s largest land animal, the world’s largest sea animal has a lot to tell us about how our brains work.⁴⁴

That’s true, however, only if places like Taranaki continue to offer us the opportunity to observe these otherwise elusive creatures. And, unfortunately, right now there’s no guarantee that safe harbor will continue to be safe.

In the summer of 2017, New Zealand’s Environmental Protection Authority gave Trans-Tasman Resources, an underwater extraction company, approval to dig up 50 million tons of iron sand each year from the Taranaki seafloor—separating out the ore and dumping the rest back into the bight. The company had argued there’s already plenty of commercial activity in the bight. While that’s true, none of the current activities amount to turning the bay into a virtual snow globe of silt from the seafloor. The decision was immediately appealed to New Zealand’s High Court.

Torres is hopeful her research will impact the bight’s future. And it might. Because when we protect the biggest of things, we protect a whole lot of other creatures, too—including rare fish like the tarahiki and the conger eel. Threats against those sea creatures might not garner the same sort of outcry as the one now confronting Trans-Tasman thanks to the bight’s blue whales. Even before the High Court got the case, nearly 14,000 Kiwis had submitted letters of protest.

“People love megafauna,” Torres said. “And the more they learn, the more protective they are.”

HOW WHALE POOP AND A TERROR ATTACK ARE HELPING US UNDERSTAND STRESS

We pushed off from the harbor on a Saturday morning, just as the final wisps of fog were clearing off the coast of Newport, Oregon. Two bald eagles watched us from the rocky jetty. The ocean was silken.

We hadn’t been underway for more than ten minutes when we spotted Pancake. The frisky teenaged female, recognizable by a round white splotch on her side, was tracing long, graceful circles in the water just to the north of the harbor’s mouth.

“This is the only place I’ve ever been where finding the whales isn’t the hard part,” Leigh Torres told me as Todd Chandler maneuvered our bright orange Zodiac boat into position behind the 40-foot gray whale. “You just leave the harbor and there they are.”

The grays here are a fascinating lot. They’re part of a group of about 20,000 that each year starts a migration in their winter breeding grounds in Baja California and then heads north to their summer feeding grounds in the Bering Sea.

Pancake is among about 200 members of that group, though, who don’t make the full trip. They pull up short—really short—along the central Oregon coast, where they wait for the rest of the crowd to head up to Alaska and head back. Give or take a few newborns or recently departed elders, it’s the same whales every year. Pancake, for instance, has been spotted in these waters since 2002.

Maybe they’re lazy. Maybe they’re smart. Nobody’s yet sure, in no small part because gray whales have been virtually ignored by scientists.

That’s not a condition unique to grays. What we know about whales—even orcas, which we’ve been capturing and keeping for entertainment, and ostensibly for study, since 1961—is absolutely dwarfed by the really basic things we don’t know. Why do whales sing? How do they find their prey? How and why did they get so big? We’ve got some great theories, but no concrete answers.

Still, when Torres traded New Zealand for the Pacific Northwest, she was amazed to find that research on the grays was so thin.

“It really shocked me when I got to Oregon,” Torres said as Pancake surfaced a few yards from our boat, rolled to her side, and lifted a flipper as though asking for a high-five. “As you can see, they’re really accessible, but not very many people had seen that as an opportunity for us to learn more about them.”

And that’s too bad, Torres said, because what we learn about grays can help us understand other whales that are much harder to find. Even the resident blues of New Zealand present a much bigger challenge for researchers, she said.

Torres thinks the scientific disinterest stems from the fact that grays have rebounded quite well from the point of near extinction in the 1950s; Eschrichtius robustus was removed from the Endangered Species List in 1994. That certainly doesn’t make them uninteresting, she said, but it does take away the sense that the research needs to be done now, before it’s too late.

But given how hard it is to study whales in general, Torres said, the grays—who live their lives a lot closer to the shore than most of their cousins—can offer us a vital window into the risks faced by cetaceans as a whole, including those who are in much greater danger of extinction.

To that end, Torres had invited me to join her and Chandler as they spent a day observing Oregon’s “resident” grays, making identifications, taking measurements by way of drone video footage, and . . .

. . . scooping up poop.

That last part was going to be my job.

“So, um . . . how do I do this, exactly?” I’d asked her as we got into position behind Pancake and waited.

“We’ll only have a short time to get it, about thirty seconds before it dissipates, but thankfully, Todd is really good at steering the boat right into it,” Torres said, pulling a small net from a bucket. “Just reach out into the water, swirl the net around, and try to get as much of it as you can, because we might only get one pass at it.”

I stared down at the net. The handle was only about 18 inches long—and I’m a tiptoes-to-reach-the-top-shelf kind of guy. It occurred to me that in order to scoop up the whale poop, I’d have to lean over the side of the boat and bend my torso right into it.

“Is it . . . gross?” I asked.

“It’s not too bad. Blue whale poop is actually a lot worse. It’s runnier,” she said. “But what we get out of it makes it totally worth it.”

From a research perspective, whale poop is gold. From it, we can get to know what whales are eating, we can figure out if they are pregnant or nursing, we can do genetic sampling, and we can monitor hormone levels. The fecal samples Torres and her team have been collecting for years are checked for a variety of hormones including cortisol, which is the key stress-response regulator in humans and whales alike.

The reason we know stress hormones work the same way in humans as they do in whales is a very sad one. Back in September of 2001, researchers from the New England Aquarium were studying right whales in the Bay of Fundy, between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick off the easternmost point of Maine, when, as Alan Jackson later sang, “the world stopped turning.”⁴⁵

Now, the world didn’t actually stop turning.⁴⁶ What did stop spinning around, though, were the propellers of commercial ships in the western Atlantic Ocean as the United States and Canada shut down shipping traffic to thwart potential follow-on attacks. When that happened, the researchers—who, like Torres, had been collecting whale feces—saw an immediate drop in the whales’ glucocorticoids, the class of steroid hormones that includes cortisol,⁴⁷ demonstrating the tremendous impact maritime traffic has on whale health. That finding alone set the stage for a fascinating set of questions about how commercial and industrial activity impacts the stress levels of all animals, including humans.

Now, Torres is working to build upon those findings. Her colleague, Joe Haxel, has stationed hydrophones at various places where Oregon’s resident whales congregate. Since shipping noise can vary greatly from day to day, the constant monitoring and steadfast poop-collection efforts will enable the research team to see what happens to the whales’ stress levels as commercial activity rises and falls.

The key, though, is getting the poop. We followed Pancake for about forty-five minutes without any luck in this regard, and then moved onto another whale, and another, and another. As the day went on, I went from dreading my assigned job to fretting I wouldn’t get to do it, for I realized that, gross as it was likely to be, there’s no better way to start a story than “So there I was, picking up whale poop.”

Alas, the whales didn’t cooperate. So here’s the best I can do: “So there I was, awash in whale snot.”

One of the most important goals of Torres’s research is to connect fecal samples to specific whales. To do this on gray whales, the research team needs to get photos, which can be used to connect the animals’ monochrome patches, scratches, scars, and barnacles to a database of previously identified animals, like our friend Pancake. To be as certain as possible that they’re not observing similarly patterned animals, Torres’s team always tries to get photos from both sides—another job I got tasked with that day—and that often means they have to put the boat downwind of the whales.

Torres and Chandler knew what that meant. I didn’t. So when Pancake surfaced, shoreside and just yards from our boat, and sent a misty cloud into the morning air, and I looked over to see both of them dipping their heads into their arms, I just figured I was witnessing a strange inside joke.

And then it hit me: a slimy wet blanket of air with the stench of rotten fish and bile.

Just about everyone who studies whales has had this experience. And whale blow, also known as exhaled breath condensate, or EBC, can hang in the air for quite a bit—so long that sometimes you can even smell an animal before you see them.

This shared experience inspired Iain Kerr, the chief executive officer of Ocean Alliance, a whale research and education organization based in Massachusetts, to think about other ways of collecting biological samples from whales.

The reason why EBC smells so bad, Kerr realized, is because it’s chock full of chemical and organic material. With each mighty blow, a whale sends a huge plume of carbon dioxide into the air, carrying with it phlegm, microbes, and even little loosened pieces of whale flesh.

What, he wondered, might we learn if we could capture it?

A few scientists had tried to do this before—driving their boats within feet of their research subjects and holding long sticks, sponges affixed to the end, over their blowholes. It was incredibly hard. It was dangerous. And it was likely stressing out the whales.

Like many research organizations, Ocean Alliance had long ago figured out the benefit of drones for video observation. And as he watched the increasing ease, accuracy, and speed at which drones could be flown, Kerr had an idea. He attached specimen-collection sponges to the miniature aircraft and began flying them over the whales his organization studies—right into the EBC.

Thus, SnotBot was born.

It didn’t take long for SnotBot to start demonstrating its merits. In its first major expedition, the drone captured EBC samples from blue whales—and a University of Alaska marine biologist named Kendall Mashburn was quickly able to identify both cortisol and progestogens, giving scientists a new way to test whales for stress and reproductive status. Torres later told me SnotBot was giving her reason to wonder if she would soon be able to spend a little less time following Oregon’s resident grays in wait of all that magical poop.

SnotBot is a great example of how scientists are applying relatively cheap technology to attack some really big challenges. It’s also proof that people who aren’t scientists are eager to support science—especially when a superlative organism is involved. When Kerr wanted to fund his SnotBot project, he turned to Kickstarter, and quickly met his fundraising goal of $225,000 with donations from more than 1,700 individuals.

Talk to any scientist for long, and eventually the subject will turn to money. Research funding cut during the last global recession didn’t rebound in many areas when the economy took a turn for the better. After surveying 11,000 researchers in 2014, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that nearly half had abandoned research they considered to be “central” to their mission because of lost funding.⁴⁸ The problem, the report’s writers concluded, is that basic research “often seems to have no immediate payoff.”

That perception isn’t wrong. Foundation-laying research, of the sort we’re just now coming around to doing on extreme creatures like elephants, giraffes, and whales, won’t generally give us novel cures for diseases or mind-blowing revelations about our universe. But none of that other stuff is ever going to happen unless we lay that foundation.

A lot of tiny donations aren’t likely to level the funding field. But the success of projects like SnotBot can give us a clue about how to get people excited about science. That, in turn, can help us better understand how to galvanize public interest and support in a bid to compel legislators and policymakers to act.

And, as Torres noted, nothing excites people quite like megafauna.

We don’t have to stop at megafauna, though. For the world’s biggest organisms aren’t fauna at all.

HOW THE WORLD’S TALLEST TREES ARE FIGHTING GLOBAL WARMING

An earthy face appeared over the ledge of a plywood platform suspended 170 feet above the forest floor. “You just climbed my wife,” the scruffy-bearded man said. “Did you know that?”

There were a million questions I could have asked. Something about the consummation process of this intra-eukaryotic marriage, perhaps? But after a strenuous climb to what was just over the halfway point of this colossal conifer, very little came to mind.

“So you’re the one they call the Lorax?” I asked.

“Yes,” the man replied. “I speak for the trees.”

The tree-sitters I met in Fall Creek, in central Oregon, were a fascinating lot. There was the Lorax, who had indeed exchanged vows with a tree named “Grandma” on the night before my arrival, and swore he heard his bride say “I do.” There was Skye, who was dashing naked through the forest when I first rolled into a camp the eco-protesters called “Red Cloud Thunder.” There was Sage, a nineteen-year-old East Coaster who hitchhiked across the country to join the protest when he learned the old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest were at risk. They called themselves Ewoks, and starting in the spring of 1998, when the US Forest Service sold the logging rights for these woods, they had spent their days and nights in the trees in an effort to prevent loggers from cutting down some of the largest life-forms on our planet.

Sometimes, police and prosecutors would later allege, the protesters gathered at Fall Creek plotted attacks against what they considered the “corporate state” on behalf of the Earth Liberation Front. A year after I first visited their camp, two former Fall Creek tree-sitters, Craig “Critter” Marshall and Jeffrey “Free” Luers, were arrested for firebombing a Chevrolet dealership in the nearby city of Eugene. “If one in 10 people care about the planet,” Marshall later told the New York Times Magazine, “that one person has to do 10 times as much as those other nine.”⁴⁹ He was right about that—even if he was so incredibly wrong about how people should go about inciting change. The tree-sitters were already seen by most people as kooky. In the wake of the firebombing, they started to look like something else: terrorists.

And, as it turns out, we don’t need violence to save the world’s biggest trees. They’re making a perfectly good case for themselves.

In fact, they might yet save us.

There are roughly 7.5 billion people on our planet. And there are, according to one assessment from Yale University, just over 3 trillion trees.⁵⁰ Forget for a moment the notion of biomass; in numbers alone we are vastly outnumbered.

OK, now don’t forget the notion of biomass. Look out the window at the nearest tree. On the off chance it happens to be smaller than you are, it won’t likely be for long. And it will likely outlive you, too. An apple tree can live for a hundred years and more. An elm can live to be 200. An oak can live for 300 years. And each year these trees grow bigger, and bigger, and bigger still.

The tallest members of the kingdom Plantae only account for a small fraction of the total number of trees on our planet, but we have begun in recent years to recognize just how big of a deal they are in regulating atmospheric carbon.

It stands to reason that old-growth redwood forests should be good at sequestering carbon. They can grow to heights greater than 300 feet—the tallest, known as Hyperion, in Redwood National Forest, has been measured at nearly 381 feet—and they can live for more than 3,000 years. In every second of their lives, they are taking in carbon dioxide from the air and locking it away in their heartwood where it will remain even hundreds of years after the trees fall.

We’ve been aware of the impact of carbon on global warming since the 1960s, and it has been decades since a widespread scientific consensus emerged about the role of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in causing climate change. And yet no one attempted to measure just how much carbon these giants are taking in until 2009.

Doing this sort of research isn’t easy. To make it happen, a team of scientists from Humboldt State University and the University of Washington examined eleven redwood forests in California, meticulously measuring every tree and shrub—not just the towering redwoods, but everything below them, too. They ran samples of leaves, bark, and heartwood through an elemental analyzer, revealing how much of each sample was made up of carbon.⁵¹ They then used computer models to estimate the number of needles on each tree. And then, just to make sure they were right, they actually counted the needles on some of the trees. The effort took seven years.

The results were stunning. No known forest in the world is capable of storing so much carbon as the redwood forests. Not the other conifer woods of the Pacific Coast. Not the old-growth eucalyptus stands of Australia. Not even the tropical rainforests that rightfully get so much attention in the popular conservation movement. If our planet’s forests were banks and carbon were cash, the giant redwoods would be the US Federal Reserve.

And here’s the kicker: It appears the carbon-rich atmosphere humans have given this planet is actually good for redwood growth. The researchers found that as carbon dioxide levels have risen in recent decades, so too have the redwoods.

That doesn’t mean we can just let these trees do their thing and everything will be fine, especially since we’ve already destroyed about 95 percent of old-growth redwoods.⁵² There are no simple answers to vastly complex problems like climate change. But we shouldn’t succumb to the notion there is nothing we can do, either, for it’s actually not hard to make a difference—and you don’t have to live in a tree or firebomb a Chevy dealer to do it.

Want to do something significant to offset your carbon footprint? Plant a redwood, or contribute to conservation organizations like the Redwood Forest Foundation or the Save the Redwoods League. If you do, you’ll be helping to save the biggest carbon-sequesterers in the world.

But not the biggest plants. There’s actually something even bigger.

Much bigger.

HOW THE WORLD’S LARGEST PLANT WAS DISCOVERED, THEN FORGOTTEN, THEN DISCOVERED AGAIN

Burton Barnes didn’t want to make a big discovery.

He wanted to make a small one. And then another. And another after that. Over time, Barnes figured, all of those little discoveries might add up to something. Or they wouldn’t; he was fine with that, too, for he’d spent a very happy lifetime uncovering little secrets about the world without anyone else paying much mind.

Barnes spent his childhood in the rugged pine forests shadowing the shores of Pokegama Lake in northern Minnesota, where his father worked as an art teacher at Camp Mishawaka, and in the thick beech-maple woodlands to the east of his boyhood home in Charleston, Illinois. He went camping and spent his days collecting, pressing leaves and flowers, and filling meticulously detailed notebooks with descriptions of the flora he found.

Those books might have been the full extent of Barnes’s scientific adventures had it not been for his love of music, which led the avid trombonist to the University of Michigan Marching Band in the early 1950s, and then to a rather unusual German fellowship, specifically intended for a forestry student who was also a consummate musician, to study at the University of Göttingen, just miles away from the dense spruce woods and peat-moss-covered bogs of the Harz Mountains.

Barnes returned to the United States in 1959, on the centennial of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and at the dawn of the modern era of human genetics. It was a time when Canada had launched a widespread eradication program aimed at replacing the quaking aspen—Populus tremuloides, the most widely distributed tree in North America—with much more marketable conifers. And having come to appreciate during his time in Göttingen the elegance and importance of forests of all kinds, even those made up of what was widely considered a “weed tree,” Barnes set out to better understand the aspen, one small discovery at a time.

For a species so incredibly widespread—you could hike east to west across North America and barely leave the sight or shade of a quakie—there had been remarkably little study dedicated to the aspen. No one even knew how big they could get.

In fairness, that is a tough question to answer. Aspen are clonal. They spread below ground, crawling just beneath the surface of the earth through a unified root system, stretching out for water and reaching up, occasionally, for sunshine, through their stems, which most folks would call their trunks. If you see two aspen stems close together—or three or four or twenty, for that matter—you are likely looking at a unified, single genetic colony, one that might be greater in mass under the ground than above it.

Barnes had learned to classify and map forests during his time in Germany. And he’d developed a rather keen eye for subtle clues that would allow an ecologist, such as himself, to map the independent clones within a forest. Barnes traveled across North America, studying the colors and patterns on trees’ leaves and bark and comparing his notes to aerial photos, to get a better idea of how big an aspen colony could get.

Near Coot’s Slough, off the southern tip of Fish Lake in Central Utah, at an elevation of 9,000 feet, Barnes found a likely answer. He drew a perimeter around a 107-acre colony and, having done so, planted a superlative flag upon the Earth, for if the clone he found there was truly that big, it would be the largest organism ever discovered. And not by a little.

An entire herd of elephants could live under its shade. From mouth to tail, a blue whale is just barely longer than one fully grown aspen stem—and this clone has 47,000 stems. If all of its 380 feet were to fall to the ground, Hyperion, the world’s tallest-known redwood, would not even reach across the clone’s width. And at an estimated weight of 2.7 million pounds, what is thought to be world’s heaviest-known sequoia, General Sherman, is likely just a fifth as heavy as the Fish Lake aspen clone.

The clone Barnes discovered is not just big; it’s mobile. Over the course of time, an aspen colony can migrate from one place to another as it seeks better soil and exposure to the sky. And sometimes, in the midst of this slow subterranean crawl, a part of the clone can become separated from the master colony by a landslide, fire, or human intrusion. Like conjoined twins split by a surgeon’s knife, the parts remain genetically identical to the whole. So it’s possible something similar happened to this clone—a two-lane road runs right through its center—and what Barnes found is not one organism anymore, but two. If so, the separated twins would still likely be the first- and second-largest known plants in the world.⁵³

Barnes could have put his name on the Fish Lake clone, as discoverers often do. Instead, in 1976, he buried a report about his superlative discovery amid other aspen data in an obscure Canadian scientific journal. He would later say that the discovery was little more than an outlier. All he’d done, he told me in a brief correspondence in 2013, was identify “an atypical example” of one of the world’s most common trees.

When Barnes died the following year, his obituary didn’t even mention the Fish Lake aspen. And because Barnes’ discovery wasn’t particularly well known, even among forest scientists, the clone went virtually unstudied and tragically unprotected for many years.

“There were campgrounds and cabins and firewood-cutting areas inside the clone,” said Michael Grant, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, describing his first visit to the Fish Lake clone more than a decade after Barnes identified it as the largest known organism in the world. “It wasn’t marked. No one was doing anything to highlight it. There was nothing to signify that it was an important natural wonder.” The clone’s stark stems, he said, had become a gallery of arborglyphs. The carvings, concentrated around campsites, were mostly names and initials. But there were also peace signs, scriptural citations, happy faces, and crude pornographic sketches. Each carving invited insects and disease.

Grant came to see the clone’s broad anonymity as a threat to its safety. And in 1992 he came upon a way to change that. Writing in the journal Nature that year, a team of Canadian and American researchers had bragged they had found the world’s largest singularly genetic organism—a 38-acre fungus growing on the roots of trees in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Not to be outdone, the US Forest Service and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources countered with their own discovery—a 1,500-acre fungus south of Mount Adams, weighing in at an estimated 825,000 pounds. But bettering them all in Discover Magazine the following year, Grant laid out the case for Utah’s enormous aspen clone. And reasoning, as many conservationists have, that humans have a harder time destroying things that have been anthropomorphized, Grant gave the clone a name.

He and his colleagues called it “Pando”—Latin for “I spread.”

“It was simple. It was easy to say,” Grant said. “It had nice phonemes. It fit the situation reasonably well. I’m sure there were a lot of other things that would work, but that’s what we went with.”

The name stuck, even as Pando’s claim to modest fame came under increasing scientific skepticism, and suffered under the general scientific malaise that all too often surrounds biological outliers.

Then, from 2000 to 2006, a widespread drought claimed up to a fifth of the aspen in some areas of the American West, resulting in an unprecedented collapse of the biodiversity that was supported by these colonies. Suddenly, the largest known aspen clone was scientifically interesting—specifically because of its size. “If you want to know under which conditions aspen thrive,” conservation geneticist and molecular ecologist Karen Mock told me in 2013, “it’s certainly worth examining the one that appears to have thrived the most.”

But Mock wasn’t convinced that Pando was, in fact, the world’s largest known aspen clone. In fact, she told me, she strongly suspected Barnes’ 107-acre estimate was wrong. To know for sure, she needed to take a look at the purported clone’s DNA.

Before she could get to that task, she had to collect a lot of samples. Using small pieces of barbed wire, ice fishing rods, and her bicycle-helmeted children as test casters, Mock and her family practiced fishing for leaves in her backyard. It wasn’t easy. “Sometimes, the leaves are way bloody up there,” she said. Ultimately, they ditched the rods and barbed wire in favor of slingshots. Then they dried out the leaves they collected using kitty litter and crushed them into a powder to analyze the DNA.

Populus tremuloides has one of the shortest genomes among trees, with just 550 million base pairs. That’s about forty times fewer than a common pine. “But that’s still a lot of DNA,” Mock said.

When the data-crunching was done, Mock mapped the results. And instead of “taking down Pando as a construct,” as Mock expected would be the result of her work on the Fish Lake clone, the genetic tests showed Barnes’s decades-old map, based on nothing more than aerial photography and his own eye for detail, was almost perfectly aligned to a map based on the tree’s genes.

“It was almost like a tracing,” Mock marveled.

By paying attention to small details, Barnes had indeed discovered the world’s largest known plant.

What secrets might a behemoth like this hold? What scientific insights might it offer us? We don’t yet know. Like so many other superlative life-forms, this enormous aspen has gone largely unexamined. Even after Mock confirmed its gigantic size, only a handful of studies about it have been published in peer-reviewed journals.

The mysteries that remain are huge.