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by wodenokoto 2579 days ago
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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboo_blossom#Impact

2 comments

Possibly one of the best Nova titles ever - "Rat Attack" follows this phenomenon: https://www.pbs.org/video/nova-rat-attack/
Video not available in my area! But why!? Have the rights expired for US viewers??
https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000036933-...

If you are seeing this message under an episode's clip or preview, it means PBS no longer has the streaming rights to offer that full episode for online streaming.

Any program or piece of television on PBS is a piece of intellectual property (just like a song or a book). With any piece of intellectual property come certain rights and allowances for the creators, distributors, and consumers. Many of these rights include online video viewing stipulations. If a program is not available for viewing on pbs.org, it is because of the specific intellectual property rights associated with that show, and often, these rights vary from show to show.

We must purchase streaming rights separately from television broadcast rights and we are not always able to obtain the streaming rights for every program, so our online content may be more limited than programs airing on your television. In some cases, we are able to offer full episodes for online streaming for a limited period of time, and then the episodes must be taken off of our site.

While Passport does allow us to offer more content for online streaming, we are unable to offer every program for online streaming indefinitely due to the aforementioned streaming rights.

We do offer clips and previews for some programs as these are not as restricted as the full episodes and may be of interest to some users.

While these episodes may be unavailable for free online streaming, we recommend visiting the PBS Store or a third party such as iTunes or Amazon Video if you are interested in purchasing episodes of these programs.

This appears to be a mirror image version (literally) of it:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6uvx3k

It is right under the video:

Aired: 02/24/09 - Expired: 12/15/15

Very interesting, loaded it up through my Toronto VPN and was rejected too.
Related (and mentioned in See Also section of above Wikipedia page):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mautam

Causes famine. The Northeastern Indian states of Mizoram and Manipur are somewhat near the Bay of Bengal.