While he was on a university field trip in 2022, the boat in which Joseph Nguthiru was traversing Kenya’s Lake Naivasha suddenly came to a halt. It became tangled up in water hyacinth, an invasive plant that covers much of the water. Here, he and his fellow classmates in the boat were forced to sit for five long hours.
The hyacinth, which has been a problem in Kenya since the late 1980s, floats on the top of water, like a thick carpet and it can double in size in just a few days. It blocks oxygen from getting into the water, effectively making the area beneath it barren, killing aquatic life.
