Running bamboo is notoriously fast spreading and difficult to remove. What keeps its population balanced in the wild, and prevents it from crowding out the competition? I tried googling, but was inundated with gardening advice, horror stories, and assault / offensive gardening (some of the latter two presumably covering the same incident from both sides). My google-fu failed, I couldn’t really find any info about natural population controls of running bamboo in the thicket of tall tales and gardening advice.
The tiki bar industry.
Pandas
You should read Semiosis, a sci-fi book about a planet with a lot of bamboo.
It’s an awesome book! I LOVE the angle the writer takes on alien life
It can’t grow on the ocean. Yet.
Because they know what will happen if they try that shit again.
Bamboo rats feed on the underground roots of bamboo plants.
I’m not sure how much of an impact they make, but I can imagine they keep some of the growth in check.there is a lot of native bamboo in all places, so it is resilient and a lot of the times the other stuff can only catch on if its provided a space. it can then go invasive… but thats not what youre talking about
i think a lot of it is just aesthetics and that people don’t like bamboo
Pandas, yo.
Kung fu pandas specifically.
Guardians. Silent watchers. The unsung heroes.
Hungry muthafucka’s.
It is the same as other easily spreading plants. In their native habitats there are checks like diseases and predators. When you move them out of those habitats they can thrive at a new level because of the lack of those things.
Do they eat enough to kill it and the root system off? My understanding is if the roots survive they just keep spreading anyway?
Leaves/shoots are where the energy comes from. If they get destroyed enough the root will die. Usually gardeners just aren’t that patient.
Not only diseases and predators keep them in check, there are also other plants that can effectively compete with them in their native range too
Bamboo is monocarpic (true bamboo at least.). The huge clonal colony flowers once and dies, even below ground. The seeds that fall grow the next generation.
Bamboo species tend to all flower at the same time at the end of a years or decades long cycle. This bottlenecks how much it can spread clonally (underground roots) but gives it another method to spread.
Rats, mice, and other rodents eat the seeds, so there is some ecosystem regulation already
Places with good habitat but no native bamboos like Hawaii have really bad problems with colonies taking over huge areas
Climate for one. At least where I’m at its too cold for bamboo to grow. Even in peak summer it’ll try to spread but its only a matter of time till the frost destroy it.
Now kudzu on the other hand. That shit is fucking up everything.
Climate for one. At least where I’m at its too cold for bamboo to grow. Even in peak summer it’ll try to spread but its only a matter of time till the frost destroy it.
Now kudzu on the other hand. That shit is fucking up everything.
US South? I swear to calculus like 2/3 of Atlanta is covered in kudzu, it’s nuts.
Kudzu is edible, which I’m guessing will come in handy for the South about halfway through the Trump administration.
Kudzu won’t grow where I live either. I’m not actually sure what the equivalent would be. Dandelions are the most unstoppable plant I can think of. Creeping bell flowers are maybe a close second.
That’s as an invasive species, but what about in its home climate?
If you broaden your question only slightly from bamboo to bamboo and its close relatives, then it has taken over the world. It’s in the grass family, and in no small part thanks to humans, it’s literally everywhere.
I think it’s probably a combination of animals that eat bamboo and climates/habitats not suitable for bamboo.
