Appendix: What are the differences between mass seeding of the bamboo and the mass seeding of other plants?

Other plants, especially trees, display mass seeding, too: oak, beeches and some conifers have years in which an overabundance of seed is produced - for example, the well-known beech-mast. But these mast-seedings are derived from a population of adult trees of different ages, and they are capable of producing many mast-seedings over the course of their lifetime. As soon as such trees reach reproductive age they synchronize their reproduction with all the other trees in the area, using known environmental triggers, such as an exceptionally dry spring.

By contrast, when bamboo sets seed all the plants that flower are exactly the same age, the environmental cues are not well known and the parent plants die after flowering. Only one other plant group can be said to emulate the bamboo's remarkable flowering pattern, the acanthaceous, genus Strobilanthes. members of this group, such as the Indian 'niloo' (Strobilanthes kunthianus, are woody shrubs that grow as a dense group - sometimes carpeting a hillside for many square meters persisting for a species' specific period of time before flowering and dying. There are a few other species - for example, the talipot palm - that flower and seed once before dying, but these trees do not grow in dense stands like the niloo and the bamboo.