FISHBIO - The Fish Report
In 1884, the visiting Japanese delegation to the World's Fair in New Orleans handed out a seemingly innocuous gift to fair attendees. This gift, a beautiful flowering aquatic plant native to South America, was brought home to Florida by a Mrs. W.F.Fuller, who wanted to decorate her backyard fishpond. The plant began to multiply and soon choked the water of her small pond. When she thinned out the plants, a few of them made it into the water at her boat ramp on the nearby St. John River. Within a few years, the entire river was covered in a vast floating mat of vegetation so thick that boats could no longer navigate on the river. The plant, water hyacinth (
Eichornia crassipes), would turn out to be a scourge in America, as it has come to clog waterways and irrigation canals across the country, blocking sunlight and wringing previous oxygen and nutrients from the water. Brought to California in 1904, it was released by an aquatic plant enthusiast into the Sacramento River, and continues to cause massive problems to this day (
see Green Tunnels of Invasive Weeds).
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