the.com/duckweed
the world's smallest flowering plant, doubling its empire of green every two days
means Duckweed is a tiny free-floating aquatic plant that forms a green carpet across the surface of still ponds and slow water.
from A plain English compound, recorded since the medieval period: "duck" plus "weed," named simply because ducks and other waterfowl feed on it and paddle through its green film. "Weed" here carries its old, broad Old English sense of any wild low-growing plant — long before it narrowed to mean a garden nuisance.
- size
- Whole plant smaller than a pinhead
- growth
- Can double its mass in 24 hours
- protein
- Up to 40% protein, dubbed water lentil
- world record
- Wolffia is Earth's tiniest fruit
- cleanup
- Slurps nitrogen from polluted water fast
azolla pinnata — aquatic fern used in rice paddies across southeast asia to fix nitrogen and increase yields by 20-30%
lemna minor — common duckweed covering freshwater ponds in europe and north america, spreads explosively in nutrient-rich water
spirodela polyrhiza — larger duckweed species used at nasa's kennedy space center for bioregenerative life support research on spacecraft