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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...