The Plant That Can Live Thousands Of Years (Welwitschia)

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I was seeing a documentary on an plant which is very old, at least this isn't about ancestral history but about a physical plant and how long it has been in existence. The plant's name is Welwitschia scientifically called Welwitschia mirabilis and it is found in the arid and semi-arid regions of Western Namibia and Angola.


wikimedia

This plant is the only genus in its family Welwitschiaceae and that is amazing because there are a lot of genus from a family of any organism but seeing only this is quite intriguing. The name of this plant was gotten from the name of the first person who discovered it in 1859 who was an Austrian Botanist Friedrich Welwitsch. The tree has a lot of name including tree tumbo, or kharos in Afrikaans. Charles Darwin even described the Welwitschia as the ugliest plant.

Using carbon dating, we are able to see that some Welwitschia has been around for over 3000 years. That's about 1000 years before Jesus was born and died, and 300 years before the time The Odyssey Of Homer was written, we can say that this plant would have been able to tell us a little history if it had mouth. The plant ranges about 60 to 120cm in diameter and can grow to a height of 30cm above the ground with their leaves living very long compared to any other plant as their leaves continue to grow throughout the life of the plant.


flickr

Welwitschia has only two ultra long leathery leaves but one leaf can grow up to 150 meters in length in years up to 1 thousand year and as the leaf grows the end of the leaf wither and that is why it has long trail of dead leaf. In cases of rare mutations, they can have one leaf or three leaves to four leaves.

The plant has elongated deep root which allows it to access moisture very deep below the ground. While the plant lives for a very long period of time, it doesn't reproduce often reproduce because its seeds are often infected by a fungus which is transmitted via the Welwitschia bug, affecting the viability of the seed. It isn't like the Welwitschia bug is entirely bad because while it spread the fungus, it is still the plant's pollinator.


flickr

Asides from the fungus, the unavailability of water in the desert affects the germination of the seed as the seed need 55mm of rainfall to germinate and in the desert where it grows, the average amount of rain is around 10mm to 40mm yearly. How do they grow? Well since they live not farther than 100km to the coast, they usually get access to water through fogs. Animals that need water also feed on the plant during drought thereby reducing the population of the already difficult to grow plant but if it doesn't get to the root, the plant just keeps growing.

People have started to mimic the habitat of Welwitschia so it can be grown in gardens in countries like Thailand and Indonesia so they can grow it for artifact and decorations.

Reference








https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/welwitschia https://pza.sanbi.org/welwitschia-mirabilis https://www.krugerpark.co.za/africa_welwitschia.html https://www.jstor.org/stable/45066876 http://talkingplants.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-platypus-of-plant-world-most.html https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8275611/ https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/PHY_39_1_0167-0183.pdf https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/welwitschia-mirabilis

#botany #plant #science #stemgeeks #neoxian #stemng #waivio #cent #ocd #ecency
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