Bamboo blossom
Bamboo blossoming is a natural phenomenon in which the bamboos in a location blossom and become hung with bamboo seeds.
Phenomenon
Bamboos usually have a life cycle around 40 to 80 years, varying among species. Normally, new bamboos grow up from bamboo shoots at the roots. At infrequent intervals for most species, they will start to blossom. After blossom, flowers produce fruit (called "bamboo rice" in parts of India and China). Following this, the bamboo forest dies out. Since a bamboo forest usually grows from a single bamboo, the death of bamboos occurs in a large area.
Many bamboo species flower at extremely long intervals such as 65 or even 120 years. These taxa exhibit
Possible evolutionary causes
One hypothesis to explain the
Another hypothesis, called the fire cycle hypothesis, argues that periodic flowering followed by death of the adult plants has evolved as a mechanism to create disturbance in the habitat, thus providing the seedlings with a gap in which to grow. This argues that the dead culms create a large fuel load, and also a large target for lightning strikes, increasing the likelihood of wildfire.[3] Because bamboos can be aggressive as early successional plants, the seedlings would be able to outstrip other plants and take over the space left by their parents.
However, both have been disputed for different reasons. The predator satiation hypothesis does not explain why the flowering cycle is 10 times longer than the lifespan of the local rodents, something not predicted. The bamboo fire cycle hypothesis is considered by a few scientists to be unreasonable; they argue[4] that fires only result from humans and no natural fires occur in India. This notion is considered wrong based on distribution of lightning strike data during the dry season throughout India. However, another argument against this is the lack of precedent for any living organism to harness something as unpredictable as lightning strikes to increase its chance of survival as part of natural evolutionary progress.[5]
More recently, a mathematical explanation for the extreme length of the flowering cycles has been offered, involving both the
Impact
The mass fruiting also has direct economic and ecological consequences, however. For example, devastating consequences occur when the
The sudden death of large areas of bamboo puts pressure on animals that depend on bamboo as a food source, such as the endangered giant panda.[10]
Flowering produces large quantities of seeds, typically suspended from the ends of the branches. These seeds give rise to a new generation of plants that may be identical in appearance to those that preceded the flowering, or they may produce new cultivars with different characteristics, such as the presence or absence of striping or other changes in coloration of the culms.
Several bamboo species are never known to set seed even when sporadically flowering has been reported. Bambusa vulgaris, Bambusa balcooa, and Dendrocalamus stocksii are common examples of such bamboo.[11]
See also
References
- ^ JSTOR 2388036.
- ^ .
- S2CID 4415795.
- S2CID 27091595.
- S2CID 43004537.
- PMID 25963600.
- ^ Zimmer, Carl (15 May 2015). "Bamboo Mathematicians". Phenomena: The Loom. National Geographic. Archived from the original on 30 March 2016.
- ^ "muli bamboo (plant) - Encyclopædia Britannica". Britannica.com. Retrieved 2014-03-24.
- ^ Bedi, Rahul. "Rat boom threatens hunger for millions". New Zealand Herald. Retrieved November 18, 2006.
- ^ "Bamboo Blossom Won't Cause Panda Extinction: Expert". People's Daily. Retrieved August 20, 2001.
- ISBN 9788186247259. Archived from the original(PDF) on 2016-03-11. Retrieved 2016-07-23.