Question

Do bamboo plants show gregarious flowering?

Answer 1

A bamboo plant belongs to the Bambusoideae subfamily of the Poaceae family. These are a diverse groups of evergreen perennial flowering plants. Bamboo plants can grow from about 10-15 cm to about 40 m that is the largest they can be. Only once in their lifetime is the reproduction largely vegetative.

Complete answer:
To start, there are around 1500 different species of bamboo that exist and have various flowering habits and flowering intervals. There exist three ways by which flowering can be accomplished in bamboo- continuous flowering, sporadic flowering and gregarious flowering.

Most of the woody bamboo species show the presence of gregarious flowering. It means that regardless of the difference in geographical conditions or climatic conditions, all the plants of a species flower at the same time and will die some years later. Intervals in gregarious flowering depend upon the species but in a general bamboo flowering, there could be an interval of 20-120 years. To put it in simple words when a bamboo plant starts to undergo gregarious flowering, it starts for all the woody bamboo plants all across the world for several years period unless the entire forest is dead.

From the above discussion, we now know that some species of bamboo plants show gregarious flowering.

Note: As gregarious flowering does not occur due to environmental factors, this provides us with a hint that there should be a genetic alarm clock that exist in each bamboo cell that gives the signal for the flowering of all of them at the same time followed by its growth as well as death.