Giant Sequoia

Giant sequoias represent the terrestrial parallel to blue whale K-selection strategy: extreme investment in individual survival over thousands of years rather than rapid reproduction. A single sequoia can live 3,000+ years, reaching 300 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter. Like blue whales, they achieve sizes that approach the physical limits of their medium—sequoias are constrained by the mechanics of water transport against gravity, just as whales are constrained by the physics of size in water.

The metabolic scaling parallels are striking. Sequoias grow slowly after initial establishment, adding mass at rates that decline predictably with size. A thousand-year-old sequoia adds roughly the same annual biomass as several hundred younger trees combined, yet its growth rate per unit mass is far lower. This mirrors Kleiber's Law in animals: larger organisms are more efficient per unit mass but slower in absolute metabolic terms.

The business parallel is infrastructure companies and institutions designed for centuries. Just as sequoias invest heavily in fire-resistant bark, disease-resistant chemistry, and structural redundancy, long-duration institutions invest in governance structures, brand reputation, and regulatory relationships that compound over decades. The sequoia strategy fails catastrophically when the environment changes faster than the organism can adapt—climate change threatens sequoias precisely because their multi-century lifecycles cannot evolve fast enough to track rapid environmental shifts.