30-01-2025
Hunters of Australia's rare 'giant trees' warn time running out to visit them: 'Biggest in the universe'
Australia's island state is home to the world's largest flowering trees (eucalyptus regnans), the tallest of which is a 96-metre giant called 'Centurion'. But a major threat could mean their days are numbered, prompting intrepid "big tree hunters" to venture into some of the country's most remote forests to photograph and measure them.
The team located 18 trees taller than 90 metres, and the results were published by CSIRO in its Australian Journal of Botany. Lead author and researcher Brett Mifsud explained to Yahoo News his work is about 'marking a moment in time'.
'There's a fear factor here, that in 100 or even 50 years, the only record these trees ever existed will be photographs or a paper like this. Long after I'm gone, people will be asking, Really, there were trees that big?' he said.
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Worsening fire conditions are the biggest threat. As large trees develop over centuries, large fissures form in their trunks. Rare species including swift parrots need these hollows to nest in, but they also provide pathways for fire to enter the tree's trunk and gut it from the inside.
'When I surveyed the forests after the 2019 bushfires in Tasmania, even in places where the burning wasn't that hot, every single old tree I'd go to visit had been destroyed. Yet younger regrowth trees just near them had been scorched at the base, but they were fine,' he said.
They're ripping trees, gobsmackingly large. The average person would be surprised to know they exist in Mifsud
University of Tasmania fire scientist Professor David Bowman became involved in the research after hearing Mifsud warn during a public talk that half of the giant trees he'd been studying in Tasmania had been killed during the 2018/2019 bushfires, a year before Black Summer scorched the mainland.
'I'd been fixating, meditating on this. Fires are killing the biggest flowering plants in the universe. And that's just yet another diagnostic that things aren't quite right on planet Earth,' he told Yahoo.
'So I rang him and asked, 'Does anybody know about this?' And he said no.'
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The majority of tall trees were already gone within the first 150 years of European settlement. Like the world's giant fish, they had been harvested to near extinction.
Outside of Tasmania, few giant trees remain. Western Australia's tallest tree is 78 metres high, NSW has one that reaches 71 metres, and Queensland's highest is 72.8 metres. But there are no known trees above 70 metres in South Australia, the Northern Territory, or the ACT. Tall trees in Victoria are rare because only 1 per cent of its old-growth eucalyptus regnans forest is left after years of logging encouraged by successive state governments, but one survivor stretches to 93 metres.
'In Victoria's Strzelecki Ranges, there's a sign saying, 'Site of the world's tallest tree'. But there's nothing there today but a cleared paddock and a cyprus hedge,' Mifsud said.
'When people actually see a really big tree, they go, 'Wow, this truly is a relic from well before colonisation'. These trees take 500-plus years to get this big and they can be gone in an afternoon.'
We've got the largest flowering plants on the planet, and it's taken 500 years for them to get there, but one fire could end Mifsud
Climbing Australia's giant trees is like entering another world, with each trunk supporting an ecosystem of plants, animals and insects.
"Wildlife doesn't see you as a danger and just climbs over you, whereas on the ground, it would probably be scurrying around," Mifsud said.
"The scale of it all is remarkable. When you think of being a little kid, trying to put your hand around a branch. Well up there, some of the branches are almost a metre thick. Everything is enlarged."
Before the Hawke Labor Government commissioned the Helsham inquiry into logging across Tasmania, virtually every surviving giant tree was located inside state forest that had been earmarked for logging.
'It was conservation campaigns and public awareness that pushed governments to make decisions to place some of them in World Heritage areas,' Mifsud added.
'Today when you go to a giant tree on this list, some of them are literally metres from clear-cut logging.'
Mifsud, who works as a school teacher, has used his spare time to study tall trees for the last 35 years. Today he warns it could be the public's 'last chance' to see these giants before they are gone.
"Climate change is increasing the severity of bushfires, and weather systems are changing. "That's my big fear," he said."
'Fires are getting worse. There's more dry lightning in Tasmania. There are drier, hotter, longer summers. Fire is their big enemy. So I urge people to maybe get out there and see the forest before it's too late.'
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