India's Rat "Armies" - Tied To Bamboo Seeding Events - Likely To Worsen As Climate Warms - BBC

[hatrack]

EDIT

Bamboo forest covers more than 26,000 square kilometres throughout the north-eastern state of Mizoram, extending into the Chin Hills of Burma and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. This species of bamboo (Melcocanna baccifera) is invaluable for farmers whose entire livelihood is based on what they can grow. It provides a building material, clothing and even food - in the form of bamboo shoots.

Ecologically though, it is an aggressive plant that has annihilated its competition, and carpeted the area. Approximately every 50 years, though, that carpet of forest dies off. Whatever the environmental conditions, an internal clock signals to each plant that it is time to flower, set seed and die.

"It's a way for the bamboo to ensure that the seeds survive," explains Steve Belmain, an ecologist from Greenwich University in London. "But when the bamboo seed falls - you end up with 80 tonnes of seed per hectare on the ground. That's 80 tonnes of food just lying there waiting to be eaten."

For Dr Belmain and his colleagues, the most recent bamboo flowering, which began in 2004 and will continue to 2011, provided a unique opportunity to study an event that only occurs every half century. "Before this, all we had was anecdotes from 50 years ago," he told BBC News. "It had become a legend - many people who live in the area now weren't alive during the last outbreak."

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9198000/9198744.stm

[rocktivity]

1. Sounds like a job for

The Rat Patrol!



:headbang:
rocktivity

[Kolesar]

2. The domesticated chicken used to be called the "bamboo pheasant" in the local language

There was a great show about the bamboo on PBS a few months ago