Reading an old forestry report and found a surprising detail about oak wilt

I was looking through a 1990s report from the Michigan DNR and saw that a single infected red oak can produce over 100,000 fungal mats in a season. I had no idea the scale was that massive for spore production. Has anyone else come across stats that changed how you view a common tree disease?

3 comments

3 Comments

miles9461mo ago

That number is just wild to think about.

evac891mo agoMost Upvoted

Right? My brain just bluescreens trying to picture it.

ryanburns26d ago

Bluescreens? Come on, it's not that complicated. A million seconds is about 11 days. A billion seconds is around 32 years. That's just basic division, not some abstract concept. We deal with massive numbers every time we check the national debt or see how many miles light travels in a year. It's just a big number, not a magic spell. Our brains are perfectly capable of understanding scale when we bother to do the math instead of pretending it's impossible.