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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bamboo blossom | 2/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_blossom | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T10:53:53.961137+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Ecology and animals === The mass fruiting also has direct economic and ecological consequences, however. For example, devastating consequences occur when the Melocanna bambusoides population flowers and fruits once every 30–35 years around the Bay of Bengal. The death of the bamboo plants following their fruiting means the local people lose their building material, and the large increase in bamboo fruit leads to a rapid increase in rodent populations. As the number of rodents increases, they consume all available food, including grain fields and stored food, sometimes leading to famine. These rats can also carry dangerous diseases, such as typhus, typhoid, and bubonic plague, which can reach epidemic proportions as the rodents increase in number. The relationship between rat populations and bamboo flowering was examined in a 2009 Nova documentary Rat Attack. 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. It has also been hypothesized that ancestors of the domesticated chicken adapted to this sporadic burst of food supply by aggressively laying eggs when the blossom and seed dispersal occurs.
=== Bamboo genetics === 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. Flowering represents a form of sexual representation, which generates more genetic diversity than clonal propagatioin. Conversely, the rarity of flowering events make it harder to artifically create new breeds of bamboo by sexual reproduction. "It is possible to predict bamboo flowering by analyzing environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, and rainfall, intrinsic biological rhythms of specific bamboo species, and the morphology of bamboo rhizomes." Some chemicals such as auxin–cytokinin and ABA are known to induce flowering in vitro but have not been used on whole plants. Bamboo pollen can be preserved as genetic material useful for future breeding efforts, allowing populations that flower out of sync or even different species to be crossed. 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. As an alternative to sexual reproduction, genetic engineering may be used to directly incorporate desired traits.
== See also == Mautam
== References ==