Weymouth Woods and the Longleaf Pine Ecosystem
The Longleaf pine is an evergreen conifer like other pines that you might see such as the Loblolly pine, but that gets its name because it has the longest leaves (needles) of all the eastern pines. The LLP leaves can grow up to 18”.
It all starts with the developing cone. The big clouds of pollen we see in the spring here are mostly pine pollen. And once that pollen meets up with an undeveloped cone, that cone can start to grow and produce the seeds. After about 2 years of becoming large and green they’ll dry up in the fall, these bracts will open up, and then seeds will start to fall out. When that baby seed hits the ground, it has a pretty low chance of survival. After all, the seed are very high in calories, or energy, that animals like squirrels need to stock up on before winter.
The ones that do survive and germinate will start anchoring down with their taproot. The next spring they’ll start to look like a little tuft of grass. They’ll stay this way for several years, just working on that taproot, and then all of a sudden, one spring they start to grow. And quickly! At this stage they can grow 2–3 ft per year! After a couple years they slow down, and start to put out limbs. Then after 30 or 40 years, they start to look like the rest of the full grown trees, and can start producing pine cones And that starts the cycle all over again!
The longleaf pine is adapted to living with fire. We have so many afternoon thunderstorms in the spring and summer, and some of those storms bring lightning, which can start wildfires. It’s been that way for thousands of years, and every stage of the longleaf life cycle is adapted to surviving these fires. For instance, when the tree is going through that really fast phase and looks like a bottle brush, it’s growing quickly so this bud at the end here (pointing to a tree tip) can get above any flames from a fire. If that growing bud gets burned, the tree dies. And so in the smallest stage, the grass stage, you don’t even see that bud. It’s not very developed yet, and tucks itself inside this thick bunch of needles, so only the outside of the needles singe, not the bud at the middle.
Since Weymouth Woods is a pretty small park, we can’t really just hope lightning strikes just in the right place. But even if it did, we couldn’t just let it burn because we are surrounded by houses and of course our visitor center. So park rangers and other staff use controlled burning, or prescribed burning, to mimic what happens naturally.
We do usually find longleaf where the soil is sandy, and that’s because not many other trees are as well-adapted to growing where it’s so dry and with very few nutrients. Longleaf can grow a really long taproot, about 15 ft long, to anchor itself into the loose sand ground.
Student Resources:
Discover More (reading page) — Longleaf Ecosystem
Tarheel Toast (reading page)
Explore Outdoors — Looking at Life Cycle Stages
Glossary — Longleaf Ecosystem
Weymouth Woods Sandhills Nature Preserve Fact Sheet
Weymouth Woods Longleaf Pine video and student resources are correlated with the following North Carolina Standards:
(5.L.2.2): Classify organisms as producer/consumer/decomposer (one of each in this example of symbiosis)
(5.L.2.3) Infer effects from interconnected relationship of plants and animals in ecosystem (everyone can be more efficient and successful with this interconnectedness)
6th grade: — Summarize how abiotic factors affect an organism’s ability to grow/survive/photosynthesize (poor soils of the sandhills make it extra essential for longleaf to have mycorrhizal relationships)
