Contrary to Common Belief, Some Older Trees Make Fewer Seeds

An analysis of more than half a million trees reveals that many species begin to taper off seed production once they hit a certain size.

Written byAnnie Melchor

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The paper
T. Qiu et al., “Is there tree senescence? The fecundity evidence,” PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.2106130118, 2021.

According to Duke University ecologist James Clark, many researchers think that, given the right conditions, trees can generally continue to grow for a very long time, producing more seeds all the while. But the common agricultural practice of replacing fruit and nut trees every few decades to avoid declining yields belies this dogma, he points out. “Nobody who’s trying to produce seeds or nuts for a profession would rip out their trees and plant new ones if they didn’t have to.”

To get to the root of this apparent contradiction, Clark and a team of more than 60 researchers from 12 countries embarked on a massive undertaking: analyzing a long-term plant monitoring database to analyze the relationship between tree size (which they used as a proxy for age) and seed production ...

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Meet the Author

Annie Melchor
Stephanie "Annie" Melchor got her PhD from the University of Virginia in 2020, studying how the immune response to the parasite Toxoplasma gondii leads to muscle wasting and tissue scarring in mice. While she is still an ardent immunology fangirl, she left the bench to become a science writer and received her master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2021. You can check out more of her work here.
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