Hank: Bamboo is an invasive species, but also it's helping with the climate crisis. Lots of bamboo can be good because it sucks carbon out of the air and stores it long-term in the ground. China's bamboo forests account for 11% of the total carbon sequestration in the country, and that number is rising every year.

But this isn't just bamboo. Bamboo roots foster an entire ecosystem below ground that feeds off of carbon better than woody trees. But the underlying main characters of this story are bacteria, and they fall into two main groups:

The first is the oligotrophs, and they don't need many nutrients. They are there when the bamboo is just getting started, and there isn't much carbon in the soil yet. Once carbon abounds, the copiotrophs step in; they need carbon to survive, so bamboo brings the carbon, which brings all the copiotrophs to the yard. By the time the bamboo is old, it's developed a whole community to clean up carbon even better than before.

[end]