mastication

Mechanical treatment includes wood chipping, mastication and removal of trees, branches, leaves, biomass and other material from the forest, which has built up in recent decades and can feed flames.

The group’s goal is to get the park to do more thinning, mastication and biomass removal, which they hope will reduce the risk of sequoias dying in both prescribed burns and wildfires.

Its goal is to get the park to do more thinning, mastication and biomass removal in addition to prescribed burns, she said.

But there’s a hole in the network, McGreevy said: Calaveras Big Trees officials declined the group’s offer to extend the fuel break through the park with 270 acres of mastication, even though the organization said it would secure grant funding and ensure quality control.

Indeed, Callum Ross, a biomechanist and neurobiologist at the University of Chicago, counts the origin of mastication as one the three course-changing evolutionary transitions enabled by the tongue, along with the shift from water to land and the origin of human speech.