COOL TREE ALERT, COOL TREE ALERT!

Have you ever heard of Cook pines? While native to New Caledonia, these trees are now planted pretty much everywhere. One thing of interest about them is that they tend to have tilted trunks. I guess no one really thought too much about this until fairly recently (2017) when it was discovered that the tilt was actually rather specific. Namely, the trees tend to tilt towards the equator, leaning south in the northern hemisphere and leaning north in the southern hemisphere.

According to data collected by Dr. Matthew Ritter, a professor at California Polytechnic State University, the trees have an estimated average tilt of 8.55 degrees, which is approximately double the tilt of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

That’s a steep tilt.

And it gets steeper the further away the trees are from the equator.

While other vegetation exhibits this tilting (such as cacti tilting towards the sun or flowers of Joshua trees pointing south, this is apparently the first documented case of an entire tree actively tilting. Some think it’s an adaptation for the trees to catch more sunlight at those more extreme latitudes (like the Joshua tree flowers).

Pretty cool, huh? Picture:

(Source)