Thunderbolts actually benefit some tropical trees

Amazing stuff! During evolution, lightning can make a tree more resilient to lightning, make their wood more electrically conductive and increase lifetime fecundity of the tree!

"Growing up to 55 meters tall in the tropical forests of Panama, the almendro tree is a natural lightning rod. And that appears to be a good thing: The huge charge that courses through this species during a strike electrocutes parasitic vines and leaps from branches, killing nearby trees that might compete for the almendro’s sunlight.

From 2014 to 2019, a team of scientists pinpointed 94 lightning strikes on Panama’s Barro Colorado Island. Each time, they visited the tree that was hit and checked it and surrounding trees for damage. Almendro trees, they discovered, are particularly resilient to lightning. All nine that had been struck were practically unscathed. In comparison, similarly tall trees of other species took nearly six times as much damage, and 64% of those trees died within 2 years. ...

Almendro trees have wood that is more electrically conductive than others, possibly because of how efficiently water flows through its wood. As a result, for a given amount of electrical current, almendros would likely heat up less than other species and therefore suffer less internal damage."

From the abstract:

• "Lightning strikes kill hundreds of millions of trees annually, but their role in shaping tree life history and diversity is largely unknown.
• Here, we use data from a unique lightning location system to show that some individual trees counterintuitively benefit from being struck by lightning.
• Lightning killed 56% of 93 directly struck trees and caused an average of 41% crown dieback among the survivors. However, among these struck trees, 10 direct strikes caused negligible damage to Dipteryx oleifera trees while killing 78% of their lianas and 2.1 Mg of competitor tree biomass. Nine trees of other long-lived taxa survived lightning with similar benefits. On average, a D. oleifera tree > 60 cm in diameter is struck by lightning at least five times during its lifetime, conferring these benefits repeatedly. We estimate that the ability to survive lightning increases lifetime fecundity 14-fold, largely because of reduced competition from lianas and neighboring trees. Moreover, the unusual heights and wide crowns of D. oleifera increase the probability of a direct strike by 49–68% relative to trees of the same diameter with average allometries.
• These patterns suggest that lightning plays an underappreciated role in tree competition, life history strategies, and species coexistence."

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How some tropical trees benefit from being struck by lightning: evidence for Dipteryx oleifera and other large-statured trees (open access)

The dinosaur-killing asteroid reshaped Earth's tropical forests

Recommendable! Amazing stuff!

That doomsday asteroid hit earth 66 million years ago and triggered a major extinction event! When will earth be hit again? Global Warming is a hoax! Climate Change is a religion!

"... Then the bolide hit and everything changed. That impact not only set off a massive extinction event that wiped out more than 75 percent of life on Earth, but it also redefined Earth’s tropical rainforests, transforming them from sun-dappled, open-canopied forests into the dark, dense, lush, dripping forests of today’s Amazon ...

The researchers analyzed tens of thousands of fossils of pollen, spores and leaves, collected from 39 sites across Colombia, that were dated to between 70 million and 56 million years ago.  The team then assessed overall forest plant diversity, dominant species and insect-plant interactions, and tracked how these factors shifted. Plant diversity declined by 45 percent in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid strike, the researchers found, and it took 6 million years before the rich diversity of the tropical rainforest rebounded. Even then, the forests were never the same.

“A single historical accident changed the ecological and evolutionary trajectory of tropical rainforests,” ..."

"... Extinctions were widespread, especially among gymnosperms. Angiosperm taxa came to dominate the forests over the 6 million years of recovery, when the flora began to resemble that of modern lowland neotropical forest. The leaf data also imply that the forest canopy evolved from relatively open to closed and layered, leading to increased vertical stratification and a greater diversity of plant growth forms. ..."

The dinosaur-killing asteroid reshaped Earth's tropical forests | Science News Sun-laden, open-canopied forests were transformed into the dark, dense ones seen today

Here is the link to the underlying research article:

Extinction at the end-Cretaceous and the origin of modern Neotropical rainforests