Unlike Dr. Adequate and Coragyps, I am largely ignorant of the issues and problems of biological classification, and so I can give an answer with almost complete confidence.
Birds are not reptiles. Birds are dinosaurs, which are descended from reptiles.
Mammals are not reptiles. Mammals share a common ancestor with reptiles.
Reptiles are not amphibians. Reptiles share a common ancestor with amphibians.
If my uninformed answer is sufficiently controversial then someone should propose a new thread.
I know only superficial details about Obamacare, but I wonder if the provision requiring insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions might help. Or are the remaining procedures considered elective.
If the American chestnut was supposedly wiped out by chestnut blight, why are the woods around my house full of young chestnut trees?
I actually already discovered the answer, but I found it surprising. When I began clearing out underbrush this summer I began wondering what were all these young trees that were so familiar, but I never knew what they were. Finding out that they were chestnut trees was unexpected, because I always had it in my mind that I would never see elm or chestnut trees in the woods here in the northeast because of Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight.
I assume the blight will get them in a few years. Is there a mature chestnut around?
The oldest may be 10 years old. There are many saplings and just as many seedlings and just past seedling-stage. Next to white pine they might be the most common tree in the forest.
--Percy
Edited by Percy, : Typo (but how do you hit the "p" when you're aiming for the "m"?).
I don't think there will be any more posts, so I'll give what I think is the answer now.
Omnivorous had it right, and Theodoric, too, at a less detailed level. Many chestnut trees live 10 to 20 years, plenty of time to drop chestnuts to form new seedlings. In this time they grow beneath the forest canopy to a skinny height of at most 20 feet or so. But chestnut blight eventually gets them all. They go quickly when they go.
But as Omnivorous hinted, chestnut blight does not kill the root system and new chestnut trees sprout up from it. Perhaps because of the mature root system they grow very quickly. The dead parent chestnut rots into a bare flagpole at the center of its rapidly growing saplings. Serious rot takes a long time for a hardwood, so I'm guessing some of the chestnut root systems in my woods are older than 40 years.
Eventually the young saplings are also hit by the blight, but just peering around my own forest the evidence seems to indicate that new saplings just continue to sprout. I was unable to estimate how long this might continue from a single root system.
I'm running Windows 7 with auto-synchronizing. The Linux server for the website is 3 seconds slow, it auto-synchronizes, too. I don't know the frequency of either one.
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