Dang it, Dale, you'll never be a partydoll on the Net if you don't stop criticizing the good people who give well thought answers to your contorted questions.
So please think out my input before you opine your signature improvement. Here, I'm not trying to give you a fishy answer; I trying to teach you to fish.
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The term-lengths of natural death in most plants and animals is a crafty strategy for living, so senescence is inbuilt by evolution to increase the odds of survival in a ever changing world. Some plants, the
annuals, grow from seed, flower, then seed and die, within a single year. In the wilds the annuals populate bare soils, like those created by forest fires and tree falls. They grow best in direct sunlight and don't compete well with taller, faster growing, plants whose leaves soon block the sun, so they simply die and re-invest all the important plant minerals back into their seeds which are smartly designed to sprout in a varible sequence - that is - they spread the time of germination over several years in order to hopefully capture favorable conditions for a new cycle of short term growth.
All annuals, as well as the
biennials, which grow leafy in the frist year and flower, seed, and die in the second year, are termed
monocarpics -- they bloom and seed only once in their lifespan and then they die.
A few
perennials are monocarpics. One such is a curious species of bamboo which grows chastely for almost exactly one hundred years and then explodes sexually with pink blossoms and dies. Strangely, cuttings from this bamboo that have been transplanted in the warm zones of other continents all wither and die in unison. Why one hundred years? No one knows...I think.
But most perennials are
polycarpic. Polycarpic perennials flower and bear fruit many times during their life span. The strategy of many small perennials is to survive the winter underground without a superstructure, thereby conserving vauable nutrients in blubs and root systems without having to rebuild a new understructure in order to grow upward rapidly and quickly, above the greedy leaves of their rivals, towards the life-giving rays of the sun come Spring.
Deciduous trees ape this strategy of storage of mineral assets from the green leaves into internal structures for the duration of winter so as to make them available for flowering and seed production in the spring.
Some odd facts...
A single mushroom plant
Armillaria bulbosa has been discovered that extends beneath more than 30 acres of top soil in northern Michigan. (I have named him "Fred") Fred was spawned by a single spore many thousands of years ago.
Another individual of Armillaria
A. ostoyae) in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon (I call her " Bruce") was found to be a subterranean mycelial network connecting erect, above-ground mushrooms that covered 2,000 acres and weighed more that a pod of Blue whales. Bruce, they think, is 5,000 years old.
Now here's a trick that you can try at home: cut a branch from a 4,000 year old bristlecone pine. Stick it in the ground and watch it grow. Question: How old is your bristlecone pine?
Speaking of "old" there is a stand of Buffalo Grass in Montana that dates from the end of the Pleistocene, about 12,000 years ago. Each blade is genetically identical. It is but one individual. I've named him "Jake" after my dog.
Some plants and animals don't die. When a single cell creature divides into two, which is the creature?
The answer is, of course, both. Some bacteria
is a billion years old.
So in conclusion, individuals don't die; species do. Which is alive, the plant or the seed? Death is an invention of Evolution , death helps the species to continue in the changing conditions that always occur with time. And like plants, individul humans don't die, they live as seeds in their progeny; whether their progeny be flesh and blood, or the acts they have done, or in the words that they have spoken.
And that's the truth and I'm sticking to it.
