• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
MonkeyGene.com

MonkeyGene.com

The Biology Blog

  • Home
  • Contact me
Home / Did You Know? / From where do trees get their mass?

From where do trees get their mass?

August 19, 2020 by Maris Munkevics Filed Under: Did You Know?

As a kid, I remember, I was fascinated with how a tree can grow from a tiny seed. I wondered where their bodies came from and how trees get their mass if it obviously is not stored in the seed? My assumption at the time was that all that stuff must come from the soil, but damn, I was wrong.

trees in autumn
Photo by Paul Aniszewski

Years later, when I studied biology, I learned that Jan Baptist van Helmont, a Dutch scientist, tested a similar thought in the 17th century. The idea that parts of the soil eventually becomes the plant, was the prevailing view during his time. To test it, he planted a willow in a pot and weighed the dry soil and the sapling beforehand. He let it grow for several years and weighed them both again.

Though the willow had gained a lot of weight, the mass of the soil hadn’t changed. Van Helmont concluded that trees do not grow from the soil after all, and he was right. So far, so good, but since the only thing he added to the pot was water, he concluded that trees get their mass from water. Oh, well. A bright idea, but a wrong one.

So, where do the body of trees and other plants come from, if not from the soil or the water? Interestingly, all the material that the body of trees consist of actually comes from the air. How is that possible?

Trees build their bodies from carbon dioxide

As a brief reminder, plants are mostly made of materials that contain a lot of carbon and slightly less oxygen, such as cellulose and starch. And where does all this oxygen and carbon come from? I bet that you already have an idea.

That should be no surprise that trees are good for the climate because they absorb greenhouse gasses, CO2, explicitly. But where does it go after being absorbed? CO2 is either used for energy or as a building material for the plant tissue.

That means that trees are literally taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it as wood. That is why, I suppose, gadgets that claim to remove CO2 and store it as a material receive a lot of criticism on crowdfunding platforms. Even if engineering becomes advanced enough to turn CO2 into carbon fiber (I’m sure it will), we will still have a storage problem. See, a tonne of CO2 contains enough carbon to fill four ship containers with pure carbon fiber, and we’d need to store billions of containers if we are to achieve our set climate goals.

That, of course, would be a neat solution. Imagine a device that could take up CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into, let’s say, a building material. The thing is, trees been around for a few hundred million years, and their efficiency will be hard to beat for years to come.

Related Posts:

  • How do viruses evolve and why it happens so quickly
  • How do new species evolve through isolation
  • What is a species?
  • How do genes determine your traits?

Filed Under: Did You Know?

About the author:

Hi, this is Maris here! I am a biologist, albeit a weird one. After school, I studied and graduated in engineering, and chose to pursue a career in biology about a decade later. So I went to university full-time at about the same time my kids went to school. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to. Monkeygene is a website where I share my passion for nature, human place in it, evolution, genetics, and other fields of biology. Connect with me on my Facebook page and Instagram.

Primary Sidebar

Recent

  • Why insects don’t take fall damage? Or do they?
  • Why only female mosquitoes need blood
  • Are we really more bacteria than human?
  • Do wild animals get cancer?
  • Evolution of passion: Why humans and other animals kiss

Follow me on:

Instagram Instagram Twitter Facebook

Footer

Blog:

  • Evolution
  • Genetics
  • Physiology
  • Did You Know?

About:

  • Home
  • Contact me
  • Privacy policy

Follow me:

  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Twitter
  • Facebook

Copyright © 2023