Extreme life: The biggest living thing...

Amongst the teeming life that covers Earth there are always a few species that like to take a perfectly good idea and run with it until their legs/wings/fins/whatever give out. Like getting really reaaaly big for example.

Quaking Aspens:

You probably think that the biggest trees are the famous Giant Redwoods. Well, they've got the biggest trunk girth and height. But, in this case, the old saying is true: The size of your trunk isn't what matters.

The Quaking Aspen has used a sneaky biological trick to more than pip the Redwoods to the post of flat out biggest.

And that trick is cloning.

A grove of Quaking Aspens: More incest per square meter than a whole season of Game of Thrones. 

The offspring of Quaking Aspens are, genetically, clones. The root system of one tree literally sprouts a second trunk a short distance from the first.

And then another.

And another.

So most Quaking Aspen groves are one organism with two or more trunks.

Image above: You see those trees? What do you mean which trees? All of the trees you see there. They're  all one bloody massive tree.

In the case of a colony near Fish Lake in Utah, pictured above, all the aspens in a patch over a hundred acres across form an immense super-organism. Weighing in at nearly seven thousand tons, and with an age of roughly eighty thousand years, it's not just the heaviest living thing ever; it's not far from being the oldest either. Since the root network is incalculable in length, and the above ground 'trees' can grow back from as little as one shoot, it's hard to imagine that anything short of a direct hit with an asteroid will kill this monster off.....