Pando: the largest living thing on Earth is a single tree

Pando, in Utah, is not a forest.

It's ~47,000 quaking aspens sharing one root system — one organism, 43 hectares wide, roughly 6,000 tonnes, thousands of years old. The largest living thing we know of.

Every autumn it turns gold all at once, because it's one tree breathing.

It's also dying: deer and elk eat the new shoots before they grow tall enough, so nothing replaces the old stems. Parts of the grove are fenced off, and the new growth inside those fences is the only thing keeping it alive.

Not dev-related at all, but a good thing to know.