Are trees cannibals?

Tom Dunlap

Tom Dunlap

Here from the beginning
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Retired in Minneapolis
Yesterday we put down a layer of commercial mulch around a tree. This is plain tub ground debris that's composted and then bagged. Nice and dark, nice mix of fine and coarse material.

I have to wonder if the trees 'feel' like cannibals when they ingest the nutrients from their fallen friends. Somehow it seems different when I run trimmings through a chipper then return those chips to the base of the same tree.

What do you think?
 
It is a stretch.

I don't really think so though. I mean yea the nutrients are in the tree but the tree got that from the ground at one point...so it is more recycling?
 
Tom,
Have you been hitting the barley pop this afternoon? Sounds like a subject that would come up during such a session.
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the way i see it is everythng in nature has a symbiotic relationship with eatchother. in the forests all the trees share eatch others nutrients so its almost like a thriving canibal village eating the the dead. in the end we all end up rotting and turning into nutrients that benefit another life form weather it be a tree or food to another animal. i know this sounds hippy-ish but everything in this world is connected weather we see it or not. thats what makes this earth soo incredible. symbiotic relationships all around.
 
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Tom,
Have you been hitting the barley pop this afternoon? Sounds like a subject that would come up during such a session.
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Noooo...I had the thought at work, 100% sober...just one of those balloon thoughts that float through my head when I'm doing mindless work.
 
I think if I was tree and can have some of my parts back for all those benefits, I wood be happier.
Some trees may not like Walnut chips.
I think I prefer blond mulch myself mb with a little red.
 
Tom, can you imagine how many dead cowboys and indians probably decomposed in the land where ears of corn grow that we eat? Or beans?

Or the deceased that decomposed in the middle east where olive trees now take up those nutrients?

Then we eat that corn, or eat those olives.
 
Trees in forests are constantly re-consuming their own dead parts. They are supposed to. Urban spaces would be better if we all did our part to return dead tree stuff to the tree that shed it, like you did Tom. That is whether it dropped it by itself or we cut it off and re-applied it - same thing or nearly so.
At risk of being completely pedantic - "nutrients" are food items and trees manufacture their own. It is elements or ions that trees take up from the earth.Sounds less cannibalistic this way, doesn't it?
 
Im with Frax, Trees make their own food from sun, water and air. That's why they are so cool. All that organic matter is first eaten by something else and decomposed before the nutrients can be available for the tree. I would say that No, trees can not be accused of moral depravity.
 
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All that organic matter is first eaten by something else and decomposed before the nutrients can be available for the tree. I would say that No, trees can not be accused of moral depravity.

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That is an enlightening explanation. Now I can be comfortable about trees morality again.
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