Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. With each fern no wider than an inch, mosquito ferns turned ...

Fifty-five million years ago, when scientists believe the Earth was in a near-runaway state, dangerously overheated by greenhouse gases, the Arctic Ocean was also a very different place. It was a ...

Like a priceless painting, the beautiful blue and green swirl in a lake or pond presents a look-don’t-touch kind of situation. It’s the work of proliferating cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green ...

If you ever watch a duck float across a pond, gobbling up the vegetation coating the surface, that bird is way ahead of its time. The buoyant greenery is azolla, a tiny fern that grows like crazy, ...

Al-Mafraq, Jordan – Inside a greenhouse in al-Makeefta village in northern Jordan, Iman al-Athemat stood holding a spaghetti strainer she uses to harvest Azolla growing on the surface of pools. The ...

Azolla is a floating aquatic fern with a very fast growth. That’s important for multiple reasons, the first being that the fern shows “great promise as a biofuel,” says Rothfel. While it’s been used ...

The aquatic term, 'azolla' together with the blue-green algae (anabaena azollae) provides a symbiotic association that can fix agronomically significant amounts of nitrogen (N). The usefulness of ...