Duckweed

Description

Ingrid van der Meer, a plant biotechnologist at Wageningen Universty, opens a petri dish and fishes out some duckweed with her fingers. She slides a few of the pinhead-sized plants into her mouth and starts chewing. "it has a nutty taste, she says, then adss, smiling, "It's such a nice plant. But it sticks to everything - when you are working with it, you end up with duckweed everywhere. It's theri way to spread around". Duckweed is one of the fastes-growing plants on Earth. Its biomass can double in size in as little as 16hours - it's so fast that in 2004, the government of Venezuela declared a state of emergency due to the spreading duckweed cover on Lake Maracaibo. A NASA photo taken that year showed the large body of water resembling an enormous green glob.