A race against time: The giant weeds taking over Lake Osso in Cameroon euronews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from euronews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Lake Ossa, Cameroon - Copyright AMMCO By
• Updated: 12/05/2021 - 16:41
Cameroon’s coastal waters have been invaded by three of the world’s most dangerous water weeds, proving an existential threat to aquatic ecosystems and livelihoods of riparian communities.
The latest of these weeds, Salvinia molesta, is
a free-floating, green-brown freshwater fern with branching horizontal stems. It has already invaded more than 40 per cent of
Lake Ossa (4,000 hectares), the largest natural lake found on Cameroon’s coast, since 2016.
The weed doubles in size every 10 days.
The other two, water lettuce and
water hyacinth, appeared much earlier - in 1949 and 1970 respectively, according to the Cameroon National Herbarium, a collection centre for plant specimens.