For the Wiffle Ball games my kids and their friends played in my front yard, first base was a Ginkgo biloba sapling next to the sidewalk. An eventual change to the sidewalk meant moving the Ginkgo to the backyard, where it now stands in the Wiffle Ball outfield behind a small barn. It’s decades older now and much taller, maybe sixty feet or so. Those children, now adults, can hit the ball well over the tall tree that was only a little over their height in its first years. During this autumn, the tree’s fan-shaped leaves turned to yellow, making a display of color against the leafless deciduous trees that shed their foliage earlier. Holding onto its leaves a bit longer into autumn, the Ginkgo drops them decisively in a day or two. It’s as though the tree knows what to do to shed leaves whereas the other trees indecisively drop some and keep some for weeks.
Choosing a tree so different from other deciduous trees for first base might have been my unconscious tribute to the Ginkgo’s position in the history of trees. Ginkgos are old. Some think of them as fossil trees because their lineage goes back at least to the Jurassic and possibly even farther in time. They have survived as a species because of numerous defense mechanisms and a complex genome that researchers from the Beijing Genomics Institute have unraveled. The group reports, “The 10.61 GB genome sequence containing 41,840 annotated genes was assembled in the present study. Repetitive sequences account for 76.58% of the assembled sequence….”*
.
Ginkgos are tough. The species endured not only environmental changes over more than 150 million years, but they also survived the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. The one in my back yard survived numerous touches as first base and even, when it was just a sapling, frequent bending as players tried to slow themselves down by grabbing onto “first base.” Not environmental changes, not diseases, not insect or nuclear attacks, not a bolide collision that wiped out the dinosaurs, and not the hands of children bending its young form seem to affect the Gingko. The species seems to have a built in wisdom for survival.
Individual Ginkgos can live a thousand years, but all of them belong to only a single species. Their relatives are gone. Maybe the Ginkgo will someday go extinct, but it is already among the longest lasting organisms, competing with horseshoe crabs for species longevity. And what of us? How fragile we are by comparison! We, like that “fossil tree,” are the sole species representing our genus. In just a few millions of years Earth has lost our ancestors and closest relatives: Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo Neandertal, and possibly a few others of our kind. However similar other primates are to humans, they aren’t Homo sapiens sapiens; our genomes differ.
I’m pretty sure I won’t be around to see whether or not my Ginkgo lives to be 1,000; I do know that it has weathered storms and blunt force attacks by little humans at play. I can only hope that our own species with its short-term individual lives can survive not only whatever Nature throws at it, but also the severe bending of human folly.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to see whether or not my Ginkgo will serve as first base for a generation of children playing Wiffle Ball 1,000 years from now? Yes, they would be different individuals from those who initially used it as a base, but a future generation’s playing around that tree would be good news for our species. No, that stretch of time doesn’t come close to the more than 150 million years of Ginkgo biloba, but, hey, let’s take survival one millennium at a time in imitation of the species I call “First base.” I hope we have, like the tree, some built in wisdom to endure.
54-http://gigascience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13742-016-0154-1
†Contributed equally
Choosing a tree so different from other deciduous trees for first base might have been my unconscious tribute to the Ginkgo’s position in the history of trees. Ginkgos are old. Some think of them as fossil trees because their lineage goes back at least to the Jurassic and possibly even farther in time. They have survived as a species because of numerous defense mechanisms and a complex genome that researchers from the Beijing Genomics Institute have unraveled. The group reports, “The 10.61 GB genome sequence containing 41,840 annotated genes was assembled in the present study. Repetitive sequences account for 76.58% of the assembled sequence….”*
.
Ginkgos are tough. The species endured not only environmental changes over more than 150 million years, but they also survived the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. The one in my back yard survived numerous touches as first base and even, when it was just a sapling, frequent bending as players tried to slow themselves down by grabbing onto “first base.” Not environmental changes, not diseases, not insect or nuclear attacks, not a bolide collision that wiped out the dinosaurs, and not the hands of children bending its young form seem to affect the Gingko. The species seems to have a built in wisdom for survival.
Individual Ginkgos can live a thousand years, but all of them belong to only a single species. Their relatives are gone. Maybe the Ginkgo will someday go extinct, but it is already among the longest lasting organisms, competing with horseshoe crabs for species longevity. And what of us? How fragile we are by comparison! We, like that “fossil tree,” are the sole species representing our genus. In just a few millions of years Earth has lost our ancestors and closest relatives: Homo erectus, Homo habilis, Homo Neandertal, and possibly a few others of our kind. However similar other primates are to humans, they aren’t Homo sapiens sapiens; our genomes differ.
I’m pretty sure I won’t be around to see whether or not my Ginkgo lives to be 1,000; I do know that it has weathered storms and blunt force attacks by little humans at play. I can only hope that our own species with its short-term individual lives can survive not only whatever Nature throws at it, but also the severe bending of human folly.
Wouldn’t it be interesting to see whether or not my Ginkgo will serve as first base for a generation of children playing Wiffle Ball 1,000 years from now? Yes, they would be different individuals from those who initially used it as a base, but a future generation’s playing around that tree would be good news for our species. No, that stretch of time doesn’t come close to the more than 150 million years of Ginkgo biloba, but, hey, let’s take survival one millennium at a time in imitation of the species I call “First base.” I hope we have, like the tree, some built in wisdom to endure.
54-http://gigascience.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13742-016-0154-1
†Contributed equally
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