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, doubling its biomass as quickly as every two days to conquer small bodies of water. The duck doesn’t know it—and who could blame it, really—but azolla may soon spread across human civilization, becoming food for people and livestock, fertilizer for crops, and even biofuel.
“I’m not out here saying everybody should go eat this stuff right away,” says research technologist Daniel Winstead, who’s studying azolla at Penn State. “There’s a lot of work
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