converting arrays to lists

I have been working with the Treet class to try and familiarize myself with some of the concepts.

After Loading the treets.ser file into an array:

 Treet[] treets = Treets.load();

I created a list of treets and converted the array into a List and passed it into the list:

 List<Treet> lTreets = new ArrayList<Treet>();
 lTreets = Arrays.asList(treets);

Printed out how many treets were in the list:

 System.out.printf("There are %d treets in the list lTreets %n", lTreets.size());

Printed out a specific treet in the list:

 System.out.println(lTreets.get(25));

Created a new treet:

 Treet treet = new Treet("jj", "here's a new treet #treet @treehouse", new Date(1421878767000l));

That all worked fine. but when I tried to add the new treet into the list:

 lTreets.add(treet);

It did not work, and got an error message about an unsupported operation. A little bit of googling showed my the the implementation of a List as Arrays.asList() does not support the add() method.

Some more research shows that by initializing the List as :

 List<Treet> lTreets = new ArrayList<Treet>(Arrays.asList(treets));

will fix the problem, and it does.

So here are my questions:

1. Does that cast the Array.asList as an ArrayList?
2. Is there a way to convert the array directly to an ArrayList rather than doing it via the Arrays.asList
3. How is List implemented as Arrays.asList different than an array