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 ...

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, ...

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 ...