Water Transfer Between Bamboo Culms in the Period of Sprouting.

Dongming Fang,Dirk Hölscher,Tingting Mei,Alexander Röll

doi:10.3389/fpls.2019.00786

Dongming Fang, Dirk Hölscher + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2019.00786

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Abstract

Bamboo culms are connected to neighboring culms via rhizomes, which enable resource exchange between culms. We assessed water transfer between established and neighboring, freshly sprouted culms by thermal dissipation probes (TDP) inserted into culms and the connecting rhizome. During the early phase of sprouting, highest sap flux densities in freshly sprouted culms were observed at night, whereas neighboring established culms had high sap flux densities during daytime. After leaf flushing on freshly sprouted culms, the nighttime peaks disappeared and culms switched to the diurnal sap flux patterns with daytime maxima as observed in established culms. TDP in rhizomes indicated water flowing from the established to the freshly sprouted culms. When the established culms of a clump were cut, freshly sprouted culms without leaves reduced sap flux densities rates by 79%. Our findings thus suggest that bamboos exchange water via rhizomes and that nighttime fluxes are highly important for the support of freshly sprouted culms. The (water) resource support may facilitate the very fast growth of the bamboo shoots, and enable the colonizing of new places.

Highlights

Plants with connected roots or rhizomes have the possibility to share resources with each other directly (Baret and DesRochers, 2011)
We found a significant linear relationship between Js of established culms in the B. vulgaris and G. apus control clumps (R2 = 0.9; P < 0.01; Appendix Figure S5)
After removing all established culms in a G. apus clump, daily sap flux of freshly sprouted leafless culms was estimated to be 79% lower than the corresponding values of a G. apus clump where established culms had not been removed (Figure 5); the latter was assessed indirectly by applying the ratio of 0.63 between Js of G. apus and B. vulgaris (Appendix Figure S5)

Summary

Introduction

Plants with connected roots or rhizomes have the possibility to share resources with each other directly (Baret and DesRochers, 2011). Resource exchange among connected individuals, referred to as “physiological integration” (Lau and Young, 1988; Caraco and Kelly, 1991; Kroon et al, 1996), has been intensively studied and seems to be relatively widespread in herbaceous species (Alpert and Mooney, 1986; Lau and Young, 1988; Chapman et al, 1992; Kroon et al, 1996; Stueffer et al, 1996) In tree species such as lodgepole pine (Fraser et al, 2006), aspen (Baret and DesRochers, 2011), and poplar (Adonsou et al, 2016) resource exchange via connected roots was observed. After emerging from the soil, bamboo culms can attain their full heights within 1 or 2 months, with maximum growth rates up to 10–80 cm per day

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