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.
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?
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
and thats why chickens lay eggs so often.
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.So weird how they’re inside the bamboo
Pandas
They don’t call them Great Pandas for nothing
Soil composition, access to water, temperature/seasons, mountains, salt water, etc.
It needs nutrients, water and heat, without access to that it just doesn’t grow or spread fast, or at all. So it can’t cross the deserts on its own. It can’t grow above a certain sea level so it can’t cross the mountains(Pandas regularly have to climb down the mountains to get more access to bamboo)., it can’t use salt water, it can’t grow if it gets too cold for long periods of time and so on. It’s just fast growing in ideal enviroments.
The big horror stories in regards to gardning, isn’t that it throws seeds around and just grows everywhere. It’s that once one seed as taken root, it will start growing rhizomes. Which are similar to roots, except it’s a stem that grows horizontally underground. And famously bamboo stems will grow through most things very quickly. So if you don’t put up a proper root barrier, they will grow across the nearby lawns and start sprouting roots and and shoots. And from what I remember each shoot can grow more rhizomes, so you have to basically dig up the entire area or use strong plant killing agents and go without a plants in the area for a while.
Well it doesn’t take over my yard because I got it all removed by a guy with a backhoe because it scared me. I like the way it looks but want some clumping bamboo not running bamboo, which had taken over the yard here when we bought our house. There’s still a little in one corner I just aggressively manage it. Comes over from the neighbors so it’s unavoidable.
There are bamboo forests, aren’t there? I’m sure that in its natural habitat it does have competition. Like kudzu. It’s just invasive here.
Same question for morning glory, blackberries, and every other kind of wildly spreading thing.
Peppermint (mentha piperita): hold my tea!
Japanese knotweed (Reynoutria japonica): Amateurs!
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
The sequels expand on the premise in pretty interesting ways too.
I’m intrigued.
To add to the comments already posted; Some countries also have programs that combat invasive plant species. I once worked in such a program which removed invasive American trees in Europe.
There is definitely some invasive bamboo in the forests near me that’s spreading and taking over the native habitat
The tiki bar industry.
I think it’s probably a combination of animals that eat bamboo and climates/habitats not suitable for bamboo.
