this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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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.

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[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 9 hours ago

Good starting point, but the eventually does a lot of heavy lifting here.

When plants move into a new area, they can sometimes outcompetes the species already present very effectively, and can spread unchecked, dominating the landscape and creating a monoculture. However a monoculture is more vulnerable to pestilence or disease, so eventually in years, decades, or who knows how long, a disease may spread in bamboo suppressing the population, or some new pest may evolve a way to eat bamboo more effectively and spread rapidly. Or other plants may develop other strategies. Again, in a matter of years or centuries or who knows, bamboo can become balanced out by these factors and become enmeshed in a more stable food web / ecology, which may not resemble the ecology which existed before bamboo came to that area.

P.S. I recommend reading a book called Semiosis by Sue Burke. It's all about humans who make a colony on an alien world, and over the span of nine generations develop a symbiosis with the plant species there, which are sentient.