The oldest tree in Britain, and perhaps all of Europe, is supposedly undergoing a change in its sex, according to the Daily Mail. After more than 5,000 years, Scotland's Fortingall Yew in Perthshire, Scotland is exhibiting signs of being a female.
It previously produced pollen, a male trait, but now it produces red berries, a female trait.
"Yews are normally either male or female, and in autumn and winter sexing yews is generally easy," said Max Coleman, science communicator at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. "It was, therefore, quite a surprise to me to find a group of three ripe red berries on the Fortingall Yew when the rest of the tree was clearly male."
Coleman says that the change is happening in the upper branches rather than throughout the entire tree, and that there may be more to learn from this case of gender ambiguity, according to New York Magazine.
"It's thought that there's a shift in the balance of hormone-like compounds that will cause this sex change," said Coleman. "One of the things that might be triggering it is environmental stress."
Coleman has taken a couple of the tree's berries. If they successfully gestate next spring, the Fortingall will have created its first offspring in more than one thousand years, according to the Guardian.
