[alatar]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

ATP- isn't that the stuff behind firefly lights?

Think that that's the luciferase, which is powered by adenosine 5'-triphosphate - ATP ("ATP is the main energy source for the majority of cellular functions."). It's pretty ubiquitous. My friend used to joke that wouldn't it be cool to drink a glass of ATP; the closest we came was drinking Mountain Dew syrup (no water). Don't try that at home.

Originally Posted by Lalwendë

So what Alatar actually was trying to bio-engineer was a mad combo of Telperion-Ent-Old Man Willow?

Guess that the good thing in that combination is that light travels faster than sound, so you'd see'm coming before he caught you with his singing.

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

Having recently had the sad misfortune to watch a 125 year old oak felled because of structural damage in a storm, I can say that roots are integral to a fully functioning tree. In fact, even once the trunk was sawn off, the stump persisted in pumping up/out sap/water for the now-nonexistent tree.

My thumb is black, not green, but I heard that many plants/trees store up a lot of 'food' in their roots for the winter, which dictates when you can safely prune a tree - not sure when that is.

Which raises an interesting point about ents. If roots are the 'heart' of a tree, pumping the essential life fluid through all the limbs, what fulfils that function in ents? Or are their feet hairy, like hobbit feet, but hairy with roots, which can immediately dig down into the earth once an ent stops walking? Or have ents developed a sort of secondary heart where their limbs meet at the trunk, which ensures the free flow of sap? I recall some dinosaurs actually had second brains to control the movement of their tail...

Again, my 'specialty' was human biology, and things smaller than a cell, but thought that trees 'pump' fluid by a process called transpiration, which sounds a lot like you think it might. Water kinda 'sweats out' the leaves, and this mini-vacuum draws water from the roots upward. Heard that this is a pretty important thing as if it weren't available, plants would be very flat.

Treebeard may or may not have a physical heart. He may use transpiration. My question, getting back to my mad days, is what exactly does he eat? Plants do not move because via photosynthesis they don't make a whole lot of 'food.' Another mad idea was to add chlorophyll to human skin cells so that when you're vacationing at the beach you could skip an over-priced meal or two. But that same professor made me figure out how much energy it took to walk, and how much is gathered from the sun via chlorophyll, and the answer is that you'd still need to eat - and having that green tinge to your skin, nobody would order the same dish.

Anyway, I can see Treebeard drinking most of his energy requirements (think that it would be 'heavy' even for a hobbit's taste), but can't see him setting down roots with every footfall as Ents walk just too fast.