Water hyacinth is one of the worst invaders in the world and in South Africa is especially quite bad.
My name is Matthew Paper. I work currently for the CBC as a research assistant..
I work for the water weeds program at the CBC focusing on water hyacinth
The water hyacinth is a beautiful plant there's no mistaking it has a gorgeous
purple fluorescence I mean bright purple you can see it from anywhere from meters
away and this very vibrant green and glossy leaf
Water hyacinth has large negative effects on water flow, water quality and ecosystem structure
within a system so oftentimes you'll have specific fish
specific plants that occur in a artificial lake or a a pond or even a river
water hyacinth will first off cover the entire surface and
it actually changes the water chemistry of the water itself and so killing off
everything below it so it will kill off local fish local fauna and even native
plants to that area. If you have a single little crown or a single part of
water hyacinth with just a little bit of root that will take up and it will just
grow and grow and grow. What I do is I have researched specifically on a insect
called cornops aquaticum which is a beautiful looking grasshopper
multiple colors. beautiful green a black and what it does is it feeds quite
extensively on water hyacinth and only on water hyacinth and are the agents that we have
On each leaf we look at the different types of damage
So we have a couple agents there at the moment but cornops has a really specific damage
where it if you imagine the top ofthe leaf it kind of shaves the very top
layer of the leaf as a nymph and then when it gets to an adult it actually eats the entire leaf
It's a continual release but the cost to benefit ratio is far exceeded than what you get for spraying
The fact is that it's a release and you let it go
and it will do its own thing that's the the benefit of it is that if it once in
the population has established in the location it kind of it does its own thing
and then and it feeds specifically on what it's meant to do.
The Nahoon River which is an incredibly impacted system
there was a Egeria densa which is a submerged weed there was water hyacinth
We released our insects there to see what would happen and so part of the
survey was to lay down transept lines so just an imaginary line that you set up
through water hyacinth and every time what you're doing is you laying down a
quadrant of 0.25 meters so that you can scale it up to what you
imagined the whole system would be like if you can replicate a small subset
enough times you'll be able to get an idea of what the whole system is doing
and you count the number of plants the number of leaves the number of flowers
thirty-five
It is socially impactful and environmentally impactful in a positive
way and I think it's important that people understand that anything they do
as long as they have that mindset towards creating positive reflection on
their environment and their surroundings even if it's small it makes a big difference