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by mangatmodi 2583 days ago
Long back I read that Bamboo blossoms are often accompanied by famines due to rise in rat population.
2 comments

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

IIRC the rodent populations can reproduce much faster than their predators and completely overwhelm them. Worse, once the fruits are gone the rodents start to eat everything in sight until they starve en-masse and leave the ground covered in dead rats.

Unless you are highly adept at making rat jerky you are going to be in trouble when winter comes.

> In the past maybe. Now cats, dogs and foxes population just would explode.

Why would the response of cats, dogs, and foxes be different now than in the past?

There is a hypothesis in ecology named "the mesopredator release". It states that when big predators are hunted until extinction, small and mid sized predator populations increase dramatically.