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.
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