do trees die of old age
@fairmanrants will know
short answer - yes.
long answer - nothing is immortal, however what makes a tree die is usually environment related rather than something specifically related to the trees physiological failure. ie, a tree is more likely to die due to a fire, drought, insect attack, structural decay, or climate change than something failing inherently in the tree. of course there is exceptions to this - some plants are annuals, and therefore only live for a year. but they’re small plants, and obviously not trees. For a lot of eucalypt trees in Australia, we can only really guess their life expectancy - we generally assume most live to about 200 years, but that’s likely because that’s the longest they can go before they get burned in a bushfire or die in a drought. As an example of this, for mountain ash (e. regnans), until about six years ago it was generally accepted that they lived to about 300-400 years before they died and gave way to rainforest communities. However, research found recently 500 years is probably a more likely estimate. But those trees were living pretty healthily, so who is to say they couldn’t have kept going?
anyway for the record, the oldest tree in the world is about 5000 years old. you can read more about it here.
