Water Hyacinth Was a Disaster
Published: Sunday, May 23, 2010 at 12:01 a.m.
Eli Morgan wanted to feed his cattle.
Mrs. W.F. Fuller wanted to decorate her fish pond.
The Japanese wanted to honor their American hosts by giving out pretty flowering plants.
All had good intentions. But the collective result of their introducing water hyacinths to Florida has been an ecological disaster for more than a century.
"The water hyacinth has become one of Florida's biggest headaches," the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale reported in 1986. "Hyacinths jam canals, rivers and lakes, blocking boats, breaking wooden bridges, clogging up locks and spillways, even killing fish by using up the water's oxygen."
Water hyacinths are floating perennials with large green leaves, lovely purple flowers and dense, heavy roots that trail them in the water, according to information from the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences at the University of Florida. In Florida, they grow much faster than even rabbits could think of reproducing, doubling in number in as little as 13 days.
Florida's problem with the plants began at the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition of 1884 - also known as the New Orleans World's Fair. The Sun-Sentinel reports the Japanese were giving water hyacinths to visitors as gifts.
Why the Japanese selected a South American plant to give away has been lost to time, but among the visitors who left the fair with a plant was Mrs. W.F. Fuller.
Mrs. Fuller and her husband, a citrus grower, lived along the St. Johns River in the area of Palatka. Mrs. Fuller brought the hyacinth home and placed it in her fish pond, The New York Times reported in 1964. When the plant choked her pond, she thinned out the plants and placed the extras at her boat landing on the St. John's River.
Two hundred miles of the St. John's River was soon rendered unnavigable.
"A field of it completely covers the water, and no steamboat can penetrate it beyond a short distance," a New Zealand newspaper reported in 1897.
If only the plants could have been contained to the St. Johns River. Before anyone could realize how invasive hyacinths would be, the plants had spread to our own Kissimmee River.
Cattleman Eli Morgan had come to admire the hyacinths he found in the St. Johns River. But the plant's attraction to him was practical rather than aesthetic. He wanted to use it to feed his cattle, the Sun-Sentinel reported. He brought the plants in the 1890s to the Kissimmee River.
While they are pretty, hyacinths aren't very nutritious. The plants are 96 percent water. "Cattle can starve to death eating them," the Sun-Sentinel wrote.
The damage, however, was done. From the Kissimmee, the plants were able to spread to Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades and the rest of South Florida. They have been a scourge throughout Florida ever since.
While the "Mrs. Fuller" story sounds almost mythical - did anyone else think of Mrs. O'Leary's cow? - it does seem to be true. She was later quoted saying that she thought the hyacinths would be "obvious improvements over the blossomless water lettuce that floated on Florida's waters."
"They are a beautiful plant," she said in the unnamed report, quoted by the Orlando Sentinel in 1995. "But they're a horror."
Incidentally, when Peru considered bringing piranhas to the 1984 World's Fair in New Orleans, officials promptly said no.
[ Cinnamon Bair, a Polk County native, can be reached at (e-mail address removed). ]
This story appeared in print on page D1
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