This tree is yearning to be struck by lightning

The entire forest explodes as lightning hits a tree in the tropical region.

“To the most extreme, the bombs look like they’ve disappeared,” said Evan Gola, a forest ecologist at the Carrie Ecosystem Institute in Millbrook, New York, who is a forest ecologist with dozens of trees around what was touched. Within a few months, a considerable forest ring will die.

For some reason, there is one survivor standing there who looks healthier than ever. New research Dr. Gora was published last week in the New Phytologist journal, revealing that some of the rainforest’s biggest trees will not survive the lightning attack. They thrive.

The tropical rainforest at the Baro Colorado Nature Monument in Panama is a great place to study whether some trees are immune to lightning. It is home to the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and is one of the world’s most studied tropical forests. Dr. Gola tried to study whether individual trees in the forest would benefit from being hit by lightning. And if so, does that help species populations survive on a large scale?

Early on, he spent a lot of time climbing trees, searching for signs of lightning damage. However, making critical observations is painful and inefficient. Dr. Gola began climbing one tree, convinced that it was the trunk struck, and went up 50 feet and wanted him to actually be the tree next to him. The bees also crowd Dr. Gora’s eyes and ears.

“Your whole life is just bustling,” he said. “That’s scary.”

Dr. Gola needed a more efficient way to find the trees he attacked, so he and his collaborators developed a method to monitor lightning strikes and triangulate electromagnetic signals. This technique led him to the correct tree more quickly and could be evaluated using a drone.

From 2014 to 2019, the system captured 94 lightning strikes on trees. Dr. Gola and his team visited the site to see which species were hit. They were looking for dead trees and “flashover points.” There, the leaves are sung as lightning jumps between the trees. From there, the canopy dies and the tree eventually dies.

Eighty-five species were hit, seven survived, while one literally stood out figically. The DipteryxOleifera is a towering species hit nine times, including one tree that has hit twice and appears to be more active. D. oleifera has a crown about 30% higher than the remaining trees and about 50% larger than the other trees.

“It appears there is an architecture that can be attacked more frequently,” Dr. Gola said.

All D. oleifera trees struck survived the lightning attack, but 64% of the other species died within two years. The trees surrounding D. oleifera could be 48% higher than those around other species. In one notable break, one strike killed 57 trees around D. oleifera. Lightning also D. Blowing out parasite trees from the oleifera tree.

Cleaning adjacent trees and choking grapes, D. This meant that the oleifera tree would have less competition from the light and make it easier to produce more seeds. A computer model is a D when it is hit multiple times. We estimated that the lifespan of oleifera trees could be extended by almost 300 years.

“It seemed impossible for lightning to be good for trees,” Dr. Gola said before the study. However, the evidence is D. It suggests that oleifera will benefit from each impact.

“Trees are constantly competing with each other, so you need an edge compared to what surrounds you,” said Gabriel Arellano, a forest ecologist at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the research.

The physical mechanisms that help trees survive the intense lightning strike remain unknown. Dr. Gora suggested that different trees may be more conductive and conductive, or that there may be an architecture that will escape damage.

This study was only in Panama, but similar patterns have been observed in other tropical forests. “It’s very common,” said Adrian Esquibel Muerbert, a forest ecologist at the University of Birmingham in the UK who worked with Dr. Gola but was not involved in the research. “It’s very clear when that will happen.”

Climate change is set to increase the frequency and severity of tropical thunderstorms. It appears that some trees may be more suited to the future of storms than others.