Running bamboo is notoriously fast spreading and difficult to remove. What keeps its population balanced in the wild, and prevents it from crowding out the competition? I tried googling, but was inundated with gardening advice, horror stories, and assault / offensive gardening (some of the latter two presumably covering the same incident from both sides). My google-fu failed, I couldn’t really find any info about natural population controls of running bamboo in the thicket of tall tales and gardening advice.
I have bamboo on the back corner of my property (two different types) and let me tell you that it is a never-ending war to keep it as a fairly thin line (it’s basically my privacy fence). On the plus side, it’s really good at holding the ground together, supposedly, which helps living in earthquakeland.