It is dangerous to narrow the genetic base by cloning just a few trees.
A better strategy would be to keep those trees in the gene pool but not to the exclusion of others. Clone those trees, but also clone all the others and test your results.
In New Zealand they found out that a particular geotype of Monterrey pine, a tree that is just a scrub in California, would grow so fast in New Zealand that they grew thousands of acres of trees that were clones of each other--one single genotype.
One bug, one fungus, one disease that the genotype can't resist wipes out the whole shooting match.
Cloning is a strategy that I used to build a seed orchard for Douglas-fir in Oregon. We cloned the Douglas-fir by grafting twigs (called scion material) from hundreds of trees with apparently superior characteristics onto a universal root stock. The grafted material took off and eventually became exactly like a regular tree, but better. Our plan was to collect seed from these grafted superior clones and plant them out for superior performance.
Seeds of the parent (which would have half its genetic makeup from an unknown source) were tested in different environments, called a provenance test. The poorest performers were culled out of the seed orchard. These clone trees are now producing many cones and we know which ones do best, but it makes no difference because we are out of the timber business now.
However, the same methods could be used to clone redwoods, even more so because redwood is disposed to asexual reproduction by a process called layering.
The only way the strategy can be proven is to compare clone scions in plantations of different site conditions against the average or clones of other sources in those same conditions. It is very involved and expensive. I could justify the expense for Douglas-fir by shortening the investment period through much faster growth.
If the strategy is misused, it could result in the opposite of the desired effect because of, get this:
climate change, since we don't really know whether we have global warming or whether it's just a temporary thing.
The oldest redwood trees survived for a very long time in human terms, but in terms of geologic and glacial epochs they lived but a fly's life. Nobody will live long enough to know whether the guy was right about his theories of longevity. |
