United They Stand

TWO DIFFERENT TYPES OF REDWOOD TREES SEEM TO HELP EACH OTHER SURVIVE.

- Abha and Deepa Jain

One wet winter's day, high school student Zane Moore strolled through the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park in Northern California. He watched raindrops splatter the green leaves and the brown trunks of coastal redwoods. Then his jaw dropped. In a ring of dark redwoods shone a solitaire, a tiny tree so "vibrant white," Moore says, that it shocked him. A white tree that wasn't covered in snow? How was this possible? Now a graduate student in botany at the University of California, Davis, Moore has been working to understand the answer to this question.

Pearls in the Forest

Forests of thousands of coastal redwoods cover the mountains of Northern California and Oregon. They almost look like deep green seas. But concealed beneath this canopy, along the forest margins, are about 400 smaller, paler trees. These are "albino" redwoods. "Most begin as sprouts or twigs arising directly from a parent tree," says Jarmila Pittermann. She's a plant biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Albino redwoods look the way they do because they have a problem making chlorophyll. That's the pigment that gives leavescalled needles in redwoods and other conifers-their typical green color. Some redwoods cannot make any chlorophyll. This gives their needles a snow-white color. Other albino redwoods produce just a tiny amount of chlorophyll. Their needles' hues range from creamy yellow to light green.

Color isn't the only difference, though, between albino redwoods and their green buddies. The pale trees are pretty puny, growing to a maximum of 60 feet (18 meters). That may seem tall, but it's four times shorter than an average green-leaved redwood. With a typical height of about 240 feet (73 meters), green redwoods are the tallest trees in the world.