Total Cluster: Chestnuts, lab screw-up, politics and media bias

[Chuck]

I sat on my deck this cold snowy morning, marveling at the hardwood forest only a few meters away. Massive oaks, maples, and the occasional majestic Tulip tree form an apparently endless upright puzzle of almost unnavigable hardwoods.

And these oaks and maples aren't just in my back yard- they're everywhere. From the urban streets where the youths gun each other down, to the shore of Lake Ontario, to the barren mountain tops to the south. It's virtually impossible in New York to not see a maple tree. They surround the shopping malls, they encircle my primary research fields, they grow in virtually every front yard as ornamentals.

These oaks and maples sustained, and still sustain, local life. Without them the early settlers could not have built homes, nor the ferries that opened the waterway routes. They're used extensively for firewood. And yet, despite all that, in my county the maples alone outnumber humans 50,000:1.

So it's no wonder that I enjoy, summer or winter, looking upon these great stands of powerful trees. But I'm looking at a lie.

It's not the fact that I'm looking at 100 year old regrowth; while not mature, the forests are getting there.

It's what's missing- the American Chestnut. Until wiped out by man-introduced blight in the 1880s, the AC was the queen of the forest. Taller than the oaks and maples, in some cases more numerous, and faster growing. Global warming, clear-cutting virtually all of NY after the loss of the AC, the current problem of losing all Ash trees- none was an ecological disaster rivaling the loss of the AC. The American Chestnut is a hardwood; but beyond that, it produced copious fruit (nuts) that fueled an entire ecosystem- it feed squirrels and deer which fed the Iroquois Nation and early settlers; the nuts were consumed as a critical part of all human meals. Gone.

Few people know about the American Chestnut. It's in the past. We're accustomed to the absence, and largely now ignorant of it. When we talk about Native American diets, we talk about corn; we forgot that our ancestors who migrated from Europe depending on the AC as well.

But I know it existed. So when I sit on the deck with my coffee, and marvel at "my" forest, I wonder: what would it look like?

And I'm not the only one. The American Chestnut Foundation seeks a return of the AC. And one man- Dr. Bill Powell of State University of New York College of Environmental Science, and Forestry- led the way with a genetically modified American Chestnut. Dr. Powell passed late last year, seemingly within touch of US federal approval to roll out restoration of the AC with his modified AC, the Darling-58.

This I've followed for years with great anticipation. I will not see forests of American Chestnut in my lifetime; but perhaps- just perhaps- I might somewhere, sometime, see a few stands of immature Darling-58 American Chestnuts. I'd hoped. Perhaps even, I might have some in my back yard forest to admire.

And then the shoe dropped.

Dammit, I should have known better. Just by association: SUNY ESF includes two typically problematic elements: "NY" and "SUNY" both of which are horribly corrupt and inept. But I was more than willing to pretend that in this one instance these ill elements of our state society wouldn't creep into my dream.

Of course, I get my news from the local media, all of which extolled the seemingly amazing success by ESF (It's rarely called "SUNY ESF" perhaps to distance itself from the notoriety of SUNY.) But finally, in a partial admission it comes out: they screwed up.

The media finally reports that they've been working on the wrong variant since 2016. Darling-58 isn't Darling-58, it's Darling-54. A lab error.

But it's just a naming issue, right?

That's what SUNY ESF says: “They were both produced in the same experiment when we were creating these transgenic lines" speaking of Darling-54 and Darling-58. Quoting an ESF "expert" the media makes it all look like a minor naming issue, an inconvenience: "Aside from precisely where the blight-resistant gene is inserted into the trees’ genomes, the two tree lines are “exactly the same,” he added. “The background is the same, the new DNA is the same.”

Wow, I feel better.

Not so fast. Because the American Chestnut Foundation says otherwise, and has pulled funding from the SUNY ESF Darling project. This is, as noted, finally revealed in the media. But the media then continues to be positive about the Darling project, ignoring why ACF pulled funding. You can read that here; note the title is rather optimistically misleading, saying the screw up "muddies" federal funding: https://www.newyorkupstate.com/outdoors ... trees.html

But ACF has hung out the dirty SUNY ESF laundry: it's not just renaming Darling-58 to Darling-54, or whatever, as ESF pretends. The gene splicing in the real Darling-54 replaced critical survival capabilities; field work by ACF demonstrates that the Darling-54 plants don't survive.

Fine then- let's go with Darling-58! Not so fast, says ACF: though the Darling-58 (for which it turns out, only one tree exists) spliced over different genes, those too are critical to survival of the modified American Chestnut. In other words, neither genetically modified AC from ESF is worth crap. Read the dirty laundry here: https://tacf.org/darling-58/

Yes, science is all about trial and error; it includes mistakes. But clearly here, there's two sides to the story, and one stinks. Not only does it stink, but it's typical of anything from mother SUNY and NY. Covers up, wasted money, complicit media, incomplete stories.

So now I'm at my computer, rather than outdoors with my coffee wondering when I'll see a 15 meter American Chestnut amongst my maples and oaks. Because now I know, it won't happen- not in my lifetime, and not with SUNY ESF involved.

[Jshuey]

We planted 110 chestnut trees three years ago along the Ohio River. 10 of these came the the American Chestnut Foundation, and were big potted trees. The other 100 were bare root seedlings and came from Purdue University, which has been breeding for resistance for a few decades. If you go to Google Earth, find Louisville, and follow the river south a bit it forms a "nipple" at the southern point - the tree planting covers the east half of the nipple. TNC and a private partner own almost all of the forest along the bluffs both east and west - several thousand acres between us.

It's all a big experiment - Purdue monitors both groups of trees, and by and large, they are doing well. The bare root trees were part of a larger reforestation project - ~25 acres planted at 600 trees per acre - so the chestnuts were just a small portion of what we planted. But the chestnuts are by far and away the tallest sapling in the plantings, and last summer I stood in a truck bed, and counted 20 trees in my line of sight from that one spot. They are doing great! But we will see how long they survive...

We planted these because the bluffs along the Ohio River support a population of Allegany Woodrats - one of just two populations remaining in Indiana. I thought that that chestnuts, which are big and full of nutrients, would be a great food source for the critters. There are lots of oaks that produce acorns in the adjacent forests, but these are full of tannins which make them pretty hard to digest.

[Trehopr1]

I love the American horse chestnut tree. Here in northern Illinois it's a pretty rare tree to encounter. They do grow tall and I still know of one that still exists in my childhood neighborhood about 60 yards from my parents home. It stands approximately 45 to 50 ft. A slow growing species --- as I have known of (this tree) since about the age of 7.

There was once a grand old fashioned, and rather ornate Catholic Church stationed about 30 ft back from the tree and a little to the right of it. The entire city block that the tree is on belongs to the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago. In 1969/1970 the parish decided the old church no longer supported the growing following it had so a brand new cavernous and (much less aesthetically appealing) church was built on the opposite corner of the city block. The old church was torn down but, fortunately the American horse chestnut tree stood strong and survived unscathed.

It's still leafs-out very nicely and (full) during the spring and summer and on into mid-fall when it's leaves start to drop again. It's baseball sized fruits still look so odd hanging on the branches in Aug/Sept.

I sincerely hope this endearing tree I've known of somehow survives the constant evolution of the neighborhood. It concerns me that people are just so (generally) oblivious to all things nature related. People don't differentiate different types of trees -- (a tree is a tree) so to speak so, any careless decision could spell its doom and MOST unfortunate loss someday....

[livingplanet3]

This thread prompted me to recall a Currier & Ives lithograph from 1864 that depicts an American chestnut tree - "The Village Blacksmith". It was featured in a classic Reader's Digest "coffee table" format book that I grew up with - "Our Amazing World of Nature" (1969) -

[Chuck]

We planted 110 chestnut trees three years ago along the Ohio River. ... follow the river south a bit it forms a "nipple" at the southern point - the tree planting covers the east half of the nipple. .

No kidding. I've seen that from the KY side but couldn't make out that they were AC. You've done some pretty cool projects. Waiting for the autobiography.


When I was young there was one lone AC, a big one, 1/4 mile off the road in a farmer's field- all by itself. It was a like a Rockwell painting. With no other trees around, it had spread so broadly that it didn't even look like an AC. Then a few years ago suddenly the tree was dead.