Giant Running Bamboo

Species: Giant Running Bamboo
Habitat: Every Continent except Europe and Antartica
DAK Locale: All over

Bamboo, although it looks like a tree, is actually a grass and is planted throughout the the Animal Kingdom. It is also an ancient species, being well over 100 million years old. In total, there are somewhere in excess of 1,200 species of the grass. All bamboo are grouped into two types, the runners and the clumpers.

Along the Wild Africa Trek, you will see some amazing examples of the running variety of bamboo including the Phyllostachys vivax. As a runner, the plant produces rhizomes under the surface of the soil that produces new shoots. These are called runners. The plant, such as the Phyllostachys vivax, can grow to be over 40 feet high. Some forms of bamboo are fast growing indeed, with one species growing nearly 2 inches per hour over a day. The variety in size is unparrelled in the plant world, with some forms of bamboo being merely a few inches high and others reaching over 100 feet in height.

Bamboo is also one of the most widely used plants in the world. There may be 5,000 uses of bamboo, well more than any other natural resource. The first light bulb used it. The first phonograph used it as well. It is most widely used in Asia, where it makes up much of the paper in India and other parts of the continent. And, of course, it is well known that the Giant Panda eats exclusively bamboo in the forests of the China.