> Perhaps even more surprising than the long intervals at which they flower is the fact that all plants of the same stock of bamboo will bloom at the same time, and then die, no matter where they are in the world.
> Although the mechanism has yet to be explained by science, many believe there is some kind of natural “alarm clock” in the plant’s cells causing the behavior.
That is amazing. I'm having a hard time imagining how that could even be possible, for DNA to have an "absolute" sense of time. Some kind of day/night/time of year "counting" mechanism?
There are some other examples like that in biology, my favourite being 13- and 17-year periodic cicadas [1] with one theory being that a prime number was selected for during evolution to make it more difficult to synchronize with predator life cycles.
Counters in biology are also a thing, for example Hayflick limit [2] which is a number of times a single cell can divide before it dies (partially explained by telomere shortening due to particularities of replication of the lagging DNA strand 3). What is interesting here is that plants from the same clone grown in different climates likely grow at different rates so the counter must be decoupled from cell division. Perhaps accumulation of some metabolite that adds up every season triggers it at some threshold?
In undergrad I made models of oscillator genes. They allow for digital cycle counting. They can also be chained to give base-2 counting systems. For example, cycle of gene A turns on gene B be turns off itself, one cycle of gene B turns on gene C, turns on gene A and turns off itself, etc. This would give you a binary counter.
Assuming they all oscillate the same frequency, you would get something like:
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| Cycle | A | B | C | D |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| 3 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
And then if gene D triggers flowering: Tada! you would get one flowering every 5 cycles.
In practice things are never this simple. The gene expression rules are not that straightforward, the genes do not all express in the same cycles, you need some mechanism to keep things in sync between cells and plants etc. But the simplified model shows how powerful oscillator genes with expression switches can be.
"According to their ‘delta T’ (ΔT) model, the likelihood of masts by several species, including beech and tussocks, is positively correlated with the difference between average summer temperatures in successive years: a high positive value of ΔT (i.e. last summer warmer than the preceding summer) corresponds to a high likelihood of a mast in the coming year."
I'd always imagined that these types of events involved pheromone-type signaling, but this is kind of a cool way to do distributed consensus based on external signaling.
I don't know the exact mechanism (it sounds like nobody does) but remember these are clonally propagated (until they flower, which I presume creates seeds). So most of the entire population is actually one genetic "individual". So the 'alarm clock' must be tied to the original genetic signature.
Is it also for bamboos of different ages, like if I planted a bamboo yesterday, and today was when they all bloomed, would that bloom? The article mentioned an owner planting one in 2008 and it blooming now? So, that would mean the natural clock isn't about how old they get, but for a certain date-time or period or some weather conditions perhaps?
There are a few videos out there claiming that the decline in use of Bamboo in construction/'woodworking' in Japan was not only about availability of other materials like steel and later plastic.
There was/were some species of bamboo used by craftsman that bloomed and then failed to reproduce due to weather changes. You've been working with a species of bamboo for five generations and it's just completely gone in under a year.
It could be that they all bloom when they receive a certain signal from another plant of the same species, and that they will set off that signal after storing up for 130 years after the last bloom. So even new plants will receive the signal and bloom, but the trigger takes 130 years to re-arm.
I wonder if they could adapt to a longer or shorter year cycle. Expose seeds to conditions simulating say 20 year cycles or "summer" "spring" "fall" and "winter", only slightly compressed so they are passing by over 15 calendar years. Perhaps you will have a batch of bamboo flowering 5 years earlier than their kin in the wild?
As another user mentioned, oscillating loops can achieve these phenomenon and they're extremely abundant in biology. The circadian rhythm is an excellent example of this behavior.
The Circadian Clock is essential for coordinating metabolism, growth, and reproduction, vernalization, etc. Most plants can be considered either short-day or long-day flowering, where highly-sensitive response to the delta in day-length is tracked to coordinate flowering. Nearly all plants anticipate events like sun-rise and sun-set with precision to coordinate (expensive!) photosynthetic expression, open/close stomata, alter xylem and phloem, etc.
Applying this to longer time-scales should not be terribly surprising for such sophisticated time-keepers.
Here's some information about in-vitro induction of flowering, induced with the sorts of chemicals you might expect (e.g. cytokinin promoting, auxin repressing):
As for the particular regulatory network that accomplishes this, it's very difficult to study an event that occurs so seldom. Even annual breeding cycles can make detailed genetic investigations take decades.
What we can infer from homology is that there's likely some kind of feedback and balance of hormones that 'count' the time. There is nothing "in the DNA" that tracks time, but the genes that DNA encodes can provide this clock function.
Bamboo blossom is a super interesting botanical fact, and a regular front-pager on Reddits "Today I learned"
> For example, devastating consequences occur when the Melocanna bambusoides population flowers and fruits once every 30–35 years[6] 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.[7] 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.
> And if you feel discouraged by the notion that they are bad omens, why not consider the silver lining: While it's true that the flowers signal the death of the plant, they also symbolize new beginnings, since those who rely on supercentenarian species like madake can eventually expect a fresh, healthy and abundant supply of new shoots which will last for a very long time.
This would fit very well with the notion that starting a new era also means a new start. (It might make people a little eager to overreport I suspect.)
(Before Meiji era, Japanese emperors used to routinely proclaim new eras when some notable event happened or they just felt change was needed. Common reasons are big earthquakes and other natural desasters, for example, but there also eras that were started over the sighting of a white or red bird or the find of a gold mining spot (it actually turned out not to be). (The mean era length is something like 5 years.))
Bamboo species are amazing. I grow Bambusa oldhamii - useful for food (shoots) and timber. It's a clumping variety, so quite easy to control, and tolerant (if not particularly happy) of dry, wet, heat, and cold.
But my clones are taken from a variety that flowered in the 90's, IIRC, so there's some confidence they won't all flower (and immediately die) for another ~70 years.
The variety they're talking about here is a mild running type (most runners are very rampant, and not recommended unless you've got containment systems in place).
Thailand famously had a big flowering event in the late 1980's that killed off vast tracts of plantations.
I wish my bamboo (inherited from a previous owner) would flower instead of battling me for control of my yard. I really need to read up on the best way to control it - sounds like my variety might be a "runner".
> Some cicada species have much longer life cycles, such as the North American genus, Magicicada, which has a number of distinct "broods" that go through either a 17-year or, in some parts of the region, a 13-year life cycle. The long life cycles may have developed as a response to predators, such as the cicada killer wasp and praying mantis. A specialist predator with a shorter life cycle of at least two years could not reliably prey upon the cicadas.
I wonder how long the seeds will take to germinate. I have some seeds of a hardier and more common bamboo Chusquea culeou, which have been stratified in a variety of ways and put in moist soil for over half a year now - none have germinated yet. After getting worried, I've done some research and it turns out that many types of bamboo can spend years dormant in the ground, before suddenly shooting up and growing at incredible speeds.
I've germinated a few seeds (P. edulis 'Moso' & Fargesia Jiuzhaigou IV 'Black Cherry') purchased on AliExpress (very inexpensive). I planted about 200 seeds in July of last year and achieved a germination rate of about 5%. My understanding is that bamboo seeds are not viable for very long, but it could also be that I didn't get my seeds from a very reputable dealer.
Wow, today I am one of the lucky ten thousand. This is a beautiful bit of the natural world I had no idea about.
It's wonderful to learn of something so 'purely' interesting, and (now I've dived a little down the rabbit hole) shared amongst other species like Cicada.
At the end of the 90ies, most specimen of Fargesia blossomed and died in Europe. One big contributor was, that basically they were descendant of very few, if not a single plant brought to Europe around the year 1900. With a more "natural" population, the blossoms shouldn't be that much of a big hit. I am also surprised that Phyllostachys is said to die - all literature I knew claimed that the death after blossom is limited to Fargesia.
> Perhaps even more surprising than the long intervals at which they flower is the fact that all plants of the same stock of bamboo will bloom at the same time, and then die, [...]
What?
I thought bamboo is a fast growing thing, and it's easy to grow bamboo. Just stick it into the soil in the right conditions and it'll sprout roots and grow. (It can even be grown from seeds.)
As the article mentions, some types of bamboo will flower only once every 100 odd years. When they do, they pollenate each-other and grow fruits and die.
In some parts of the world rats will feasts on these fruits, and rodent populations will explode, contributing to the "Bad Omen".
> Just stick it into the soil in the right conditions
When all the bamboo decides to flower and die at the same time, what exactly are you planning to stick in the ground?
I am growing bamboo for quite a while, and at least for the kinds which survive in European climate, you cannot cause a cut off part to sprout roots. But as bamboo is spreading via the roots, you can just cut off parts and replant it.
Interesting, it seems we are in the midst of famine conditions if it doesn't stop raining on the USA and droughting in Australia. It seems every part of the planet right now is having trouble with it's food supply.
One theory I was researching was the grand solar minimum.
In the past maybe. Now cats, dogs and foxes population just would explode.
In the 21 century finding some glass jars or metallic recipients with a solid cover lid shouldn't be a great problem. If you can find a beer or a cocacola in your village you have yet a rat-proof recipient for safely storing seeds. Rodents are edible also if not other food is available
Is also interesting to notice that this bamboo ecology fact, seen as a symbol of bad luck, gave us an unexpected and priceless gift: chicken eggs. Domestic hens are able to lay 12 months a year because red jungle fowl and bamboo forests are linked and evolved to get advantage of years of bamboo flowering
> The rest of the article can be viewed on our partner’s website, grape Japan at ”Once-In-A-Hundred Year” Sightings of Bamboo Blossoms Reported In Japan“ (https://grapee.jp/en/114838)
Why don't link the complete article instead of the japan-forward one?
radarsat1|6 years ago
> Although the mechanism has yet to be explained by science, many believe there is some kind of natural “alarm clock” in the plant’s cells causing the behavior.
That is amazing. I'm having a hard time imagining how that could even be possible, for DNA to have an "absolute" sense of time. Some kind of day/night/time of year "counting" mechanism?
puzzlingcaptcha|6 years ago
Counters in biology are also a thing, for example Hayflick limit [2] which is a number of times a single cell can divide before it dies (partially explained by telomere shortening due to particularities of replication of the lagging DNA strand 3). What is interesting here is that plants from the same clone grown in different climates likely grow at different rates so the counter must be decoupled from cell division. Perhaps accumulation of some metabolite that adds up every season triggers it at some threshold?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periodical_cicadas [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere#Shortening
tdaltonc|6 years ago
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| Cycle | A | B | C | D |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| 2 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| 3 | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
| 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 |
+-------+---+---+---+---+
And then if gene D triggers flowering: Tada! you would get one flowering every 5 cycles. In practice things are never this simple. The gene expression rules are not that straightforward, the genes do not all express in the same cycles, you need some mechanism to keep things in sync between cells and plants etc. But the simplified model shows how powerful oscillator genes with expression switches can be.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Oscillating_gene
crygin|6 years ago
"According to their ‘delta T’ (ΔT) model, the likelihood of masts by several species, including beech and tussocks, is positively correlated with the difference between average summer temperatures in successive years: a high positive value of ΔT (i.e. last summer warmer than the preceding summer) corresponds to a high likelihood of a mast in the coming year."
I'd always imagined that these types of events involved pheromone-type signaling, but this is kind of a cool way to do distributed consensus based on external signaling.
cmrdporcupine|6 years ago
deepzn|6 years ago
hinkley|6 years ago
There was/were some species of bamboo used by craftsman that bloomed and then failed to reproduce due to weather changes. You've been working with a species of bamboo for five generations and it's just completely gone in under a year.
wccrawford|6 years ago
jacobush|6 years ago
bluejellybean|6 years ago
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4758938/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4073891/
Obi_Juan_Kenobi|6 years ago
The Circadian Clock is essential for coordinating metabolism, growth, and reproduction, vernalization, etc. Most plants can be considered either short-day or long-day flowering, where highly-sensitive response to the delta in day-length is tracked to coordinate flowering. Nearly all plants anticipate events like sun-rise and sun-set with precision to coordinate (expensive!) photosynthetic expression, open/close stomata, alter xylem and phloem, etc.
Applying this to longer time-scales should not be terribly surprising for such sophisticated time-keepers.
Here's some information about in-vitro induction of flowering, induced with the sorts of chemicals you might expect (e.g. cytokinin promoting, auxin repressing):
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5603696/
As for the particular regulatory network that accomplishes this, it's very difficult to study an event that occurs so seldom. Even annual breeding cycles can make detailed genetic investigations take decades.
What we can infer from homology is that there's likely some kind of feedback and balance of hormones that 'count' the time. There is nothing "in the DNA" that tracks time, but the genes that DNA encodes can provide this clock function.
unknown|6 years ago
[deleted]
dessant|6 years ago
ComodoHacker|6 years ago
taneq|6 years ago
hammock|6 years ago
wodenokoto|6 years ago
> For example, devastating consequences occur when the Melocanna bambusoides population flowers and fruits once every 30–35 years[6] 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.[7] 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_blossom#Impact
nwhatt|6 years ago
vram22|6 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mautam
Causes famine. The Northeastern Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur are somewhat near the Bay of Bengal.
kaybe|6 years ago
This would fit very well with the notion that starting a new era also means a new start. (It might make people a little eager to overreport I suspect.)
(Before Meiji era, Japanese emperors used to routinely proclaim new eras when some notable event happened or they just felt change was needed. Common reasons are big earthquakes and other natural desasters, for example, but there also eras that were started over the sighting of a white or red bird or the find of a gold mining spot (it actually turned out not to be). (The mean era length is something like 5 years.))
luckydata|6 years ago
Jedd|6 years ago
But my clones are taken from a variety that flowered in the 90's, IIRC, so there's some confidence they won't all flower (and immediately die) for another ~70 years.
The variety they're talking about here is a mild running type (most runners are very rampant, and not recommended unless you've got containment systems in place).
Thailand famously had a big flowering event in the late 1980's that killed off vast tracts of plantations.
checker|6 years ago
isolli|6 years ago
> Some cicada species have much longer life cycles, such as the North American genus, Magicicada, which has a number of distinct "broods" that go through either a 17-year or, in some parts of the region, a 13-year life cycle. The long life cycles may have developed as a response to predators, such as the cicada killer wasp and praying mantis. A specialist predator with a shorter life cycle of at least two years could not reliably prey upon the cicadas.
There's also an evolutionary theory behind why these are prime numbers: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-cica...
superqwert|6 years ago
brensmith|6 years ago
PuffinBlue|6 years ago
It's wonderful to learn of something so 'purely' interesting, and (now I've dived a little down the rabbit hole) shared amongst other species like Cicada.
_ph_|6 years ago
pas|6 years ago
What?
I thought bamboo is a fast growing thing, and it's easy to grow bamboo. Just stick it into the soil in the right conditions and it'll sprout roots and grow. (It can even be grown from seeds.)
wodenokoto|6 years ago
As the article mentions, some types of bamboo will flower only once every 100 odd years. When they do, they pollenate each-other and grow fruits and die.
In some parts of the world rats will feasts on these fruits, and rodent populations will explode, contributing to the "Bad Omen".
> Just stick it into the soil in the right conditions
When all the bamboo decides to flower and die at the same time, what exactly are you planning to stick in the ground?
_ph_|6 years ago
mangatmodi|6 years ago
foxhop|6 years ago
One theory I was researching was the grand solar minimum.
pvaldes|6 years ago
In the 21 century finding some glass jars or metallic recipients with a solid cover lid shouldn't be a great problem. If you can find a beer or a cocacola in your village you have yet a rat-proof recipient for safely storing seeds. Rodents are edible also if not other food is available
Is also interesting to notice that this bamboo ecology fact, seen as a symbol of bad luck, gave us an unexpected and priceless gift: chicken eggs. Domestic hens are able to lay 12 months a year because red jungle fowl and bamboo forests are linked and evolved to get advantage of years of bamboo flowering
arkades|6 years ago
squeezingswirls|6 years ago
Why don't link the complete article instead of the japan-forward one?
driverShutUp|6 years ago
[deleted]
_underfl0w_|6 years ago
xtf|6 years ago
franciscojgo|6 years ago