The Mysterious Phenomenon of Bamboo Flowering

Bamboo is the fastest growing plant on Earth. A typical bamboo grew by 10 centimeters in one day. Certain species grow up to one meter during the same period, or about 1 millimeter every 2 minutes. You can actually see the plant grow in front of your eyes. Most species of bamboo reach maturity in just 5 to 8 years. Compare with other popular hardwoods that barely grow an inch a week. Trees such as oak, can take up to 120 years to reach maturity. But in terms of flowering, bamboo is probably one of the slowest plants in the world.

The flowering of bamboo is an interesting phenomenon, because it is a unique and very rare occurrence in the plant kingdom. Most bamboo flower once every 60-130 years. The old flowering interval up to now remains a mystery to many botanists.

The most massive flowering period is bamboo from Phyllostachys bambusoides species. These species exhibit other strange behaviors - they all bloom at the same time, worldwide, regardless of geographical location and climate, as long as they are from the same parent tree. Most bamboo is like that - they are 'divisions' taken from the same parent tree at a point. The division is then subdivided over time and divided around the world. Although divisions are now in geographically different locations, they still carry the same genetic. So, when bamboo plants say, in North America flowering, the same crop in Asia will do the same thing around the same time. It was as if each plant had an internal clock ticking until the alarm sounded simultaneously.

Bamboo blooms in the spring at the park in Roskilde, Denmark

According to one hypothesis, the evolution of this massive flowering is to "feed" the predator, where flowering and conception will simultaneously increase the resilience of their seed population by flooding the area with the fruit so that predators will eat what they need and then leave the grain which is left to grow into a new plant. By having longer-flowering cycles of predator age, ie rats, bamboo can regulate animal populations by causing starvation during the period between flowering events. This hypothesis still does not explain why the flowering cycle is 10 times longer than the age of the local rat.

Bamboo and fruit flowers.

Once the species of bamboo has reached its life expectancy, it has flowered and produced the seed, the plant will die, wiping out all the forest plots for several periods of years. One theory is that seed production requires a large amount of energy suppressing bamboo plants in such a way that they die. Another theory suggests that mother plants die to provide space for bamboo seeds.

Mass flowering events also attract predators, especially mice. The sudden availability of large quantities of fruit in the forest brings tens of millions of hungry mice that feed on, grow and multiply at an alarming rate. After they devoured the bamboo fruit, the rats began to consume other food crops - both stored and still in the fields. Therefore, the bamboo flowering event is almost always followed by hunger and disease in the nearby villages. In the northeastern Indian state, Mizoram, a creepy event, occurs almost every 48 to 50 years, when the bamboo species of Melocanna baccifera are flowering and fruiting. This last phenomenon occurred in 2006 to 2008, known locally as Mautam or "death of bamboo."

A black rat is eating corn in a field near the village of Zamuang in northeast Mizoram

Fargesia nitida bamboo species, flowering every 120 years