Bamboo blossom

After blossom, flowers produce fruit (called "bamboo rice" in parts of India and China).

In this species, all plants of the same stock flower at the same time, regardless of differences in geographic locations or climatic conditions, and then die.

The predator satiation hypothesis does not explain why the flowering cycle is 10 times longer than the lifespan of the local rodents, something not predicted.

This notion is considered wrong based on distribution of lightning strike data during the dry season throughout India.

However, another argument against this is the lack of precedent for any living organism to harness something as unpredictable as lightning strikes to increase its chance of survival as part of natural evolutionary progress.

For example, devastating consequences occur when the Melocanna bambusoides population flowers and fruits once every 30–35 years[8] around the Bay of Bengal.

[9] 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.

[10] It has also been hypothesized that ancestors of the domesticated chicken adapted to this sporadic burst of food supply by aggressively laying eggs when the blossom and seed dispersal occurs.

These seeds give rise to a new generation of plants that may be identical in appearance to those that preceded the flowering, or they may produce new cultivars with different characteristics, such as the presence or absence of striping or other changes in coloration of the culms.