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Oldest Tree In The UK Is Changing Its Sex

Nature & Animals

07-11-2015 | 03:54

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Oldest Tree In The UK Is Changing Its Sex

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It's never too late in life to make a change, even if you're reputed to be 5,000 years old.

A yew tree of that age -- dubbed the "Fortingall Yew" and one of the oldest trees in Europe -has been known as male for centuries, but now one of its limbs seems to have undergone a sex change.

A botanist at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh recently observed that berries, which only female yews can produce, are sprouting on one of the old tree's branches.

"I was very surprised to see a few berries on what was clearly otherwise a male tree," Dr. Max Coleman, a science communicator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh told The Huffington Post in an email.

For centuries of its long life in the Perthshire, Scotland, village of Fortingall, the tree has been recorded as male because it has male pollen-releasing buds. But while the finding is surprising, Coleman admits that sex changes are not unheard of in yews and other tree species.

"Some trees, like ash, can regularly change sex. Others, like yew, do this very rarely," he said. "We don’t fully understand why, but it probably has to do with maximizing the chances of reproduction and could be in response to environmental triggers, age or simply pure chance."

Yew trees are typically dioecious, which means they are either male or female. But a sex change can happen if there is a change in the balance of a tree's growth regulators, or hormones, The Washington Post reported.

Sometimes a tree even can keep two sexes at once for prolonged periods of time, which may be what has occurred with this yew.

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