From a green boat, Isidoro Hernández imagines a future without the Laguna de Tecocomulco. “We wouldn’t want it to dry out, we would also leave with the animals that died,” he says. Their small boat floats in the middle of plants that seem harmless and even look attractive with their violet flowers.
The man in his 60s says that, since 1999, the lagoon located in the state of Hidalgo, in central Mexico, has maintained its water levels, but seven years ago a concern reached the communities that depend on it. His concern was sparked by the presence of the water lily (Eichhornia crassipes), an exotic and invasive plant that today occupies almost 10% of the lagoon; it is as if the body of water is covered by a floating sheet of green color and purple flashes. The roots that support that vegetable carpet can reach up to two meters.
From his laboratory at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), biologist Agustín Quiroz Flores, a researcher at the Institute of Biology, explains that Brazilian citizens took some specimens of the water lily flower to New Orleans, in the United States, to offer it as an ornamental plant in a horticulture exhibition in 1884.
“One of the characters of American politics liked this plant, took it and there began a chain. It is currently the most frightening aquatic weed that exists. There are others, but this one is the most aggressive,” says Quiroz.
From the Amazon to the lakes of Mexico
There are several versions of how the water lily, a plant native to the Amazon, arrived in Mexico.
In the article “Water Lily, a plant native to Mexico?”, chemical engineer Diana Vázquez relates that the species arrived in the lakes of the Valley of Mexico in 1889. In his text, Vázquez cites the Chinampas report of the Federal District, presented in 1912 by the general director Miguel Santa María, general director of the Ministry of Development. The chinampa is an artificial cultivation system built in areas where water is the main natural resource present in the environment. It is built in order to grow plants, vegetables and vegetables for self-consumption and the local market.
Water lily in the Laguna de Tecocomulco, in the state of Hidalgo. Photo: Uriel Gámez.
The expansion of the water lily in Mexico has even been associated with an action by the country’s own presidency. In several texts, one from 1950 and another from 1967, it is mentioned that the wife of General Porfirio Díaz, Carmen Romero Rubio, was one of the people who contributed to the introduction of the water lily in 1897, “there is a photograph that shows her depositing this plant in the channels of Xochimilco in order to beautify them”.
More than 100 years later, the presence of the Amazonian plant in Mexican water bodies has become a problem.
There are no precise data, but the estimates of experts, the National Commission for the Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (Conabio) and the organization Agua Asociación Civil, agree that about 70 thousand hectares of Mexican water bodies are affected by the presence of the water lily. According to experts, this generates problems for the species that inhabit Mexican reservoirs, both for flora and fauna. In addition, its presence in the Peñitas hydroelectric plant, in Chiapas, also causes problems in the operation of turbines for electricity generation.
The water lily expands easily in bodies of water. Photo: Uriel Gámez.
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A problematic “ornament”
In the Tecocomulco Lagoon, problems with the water lily began in 2007 and have intensified over the years.
The members of the San Miguel Allende community remember that an inhabitant of the area took a specimen of lily and placed it as an ornament in the Puerco lagoon, located 27 kilometers from that of Tecocomulco. “In a storm that fell, it spread out and dragged it away. That water flows here into the lagoon. To make it look pretty they put it there, without knowing the damage it was going to cause (…) They never thought about how it spreads, the lily grows day by day, expands,” says Rufino Flores, a resident of the community.
That same version is told by Uriel Martínez, head of the Ecological Restoration Project of the Tecocomulco Lagoon of the Ministry of Environment of Hidalgo. Since 2019, the biologist graduated from the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) has been dedicated to studying the conditions of the lagoon and is currently in charge of a project to remove the lily from the place.
Inhabitants of the communities neighboring the lagoon fear that the lily will drain the lagoon, because of the amount of water it consume. Photo: Uriel Gámez.
On board a boat that advances with complications between the stains of the plant, Martínez explains that the water lily represents a risk for the more than 100 species of flora and fauna that are in the lagoon. “The lily begins to cover, when these larger spots of the plant begin to appear it is a more complicated situation since it usually monopolizes the oxygen concentrated in the water, which causes an important mortality of fish and other important species for the consumption of the inhabitants”.
Its extensive roots also affect underwater life, even changing the survival dynamics of other plants, such as carnivores, as they subtract light and oxygen. The lily prevents carnivores from deploying their defense mechanisms, which puts them at risk of disappearing, explains Dr. Quiroz Flores, who has studied the lagoon’s conditions since 1973.
A villager of the area shows the extensive roots of the water lily. Photo: Uriel Gámez.
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The impacts of neglect
On one of the shores of the lagoon, six men, some aboard boats and others on land, work with bieldos in the water lily retreat. According to IMTA’s Improvement in the Management of Invasive Exotic Aquatic Plants report, a mapping of 71 Mexican water bodies detected 42 species, of which 9 are invasive exotics, 1 exotic, 27 native with invasive behavior and 5 native. The one with the greatest presence is the water lily, as it is present in almost all the bodies of water studied.
In Tecocomulco, the problem has been accentuated in recent years by the lack of action by federal, state and local authorities to contain its expansion. According to the inhabitants of the area, it was until this federal administration that there was an approach with the community to work on the solution to the problem. On May 17, state authorities began removing the weeds manually and using machinery.
Members of the riverside community work on manual retreat. They do it in eight-hour shifts, for a payment of 1300 pesos a week (approximately 63 dollars), which the city council gives them. They are very interested in the removal of the lily because, they say, they have been the most affected in their productive activities such as fishing, hunting for some species, which they carry out under authorization from the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat), and frog breeding. They also see risks to their crops and to the area’s water supply.
Rufino Flores, one of the riparians, says that although the pandemic did not interfere with the hunting of migratory birds in 2021 – whose season is established in the General Wildlife Law – the presence of the lily did. In addition to obstructing the passage of the boats, it increased the mortality of birds that when submerged were stuck between their roots. “The hunters couldn’t get in. Already this season, blessed be God, we were able to enter the lagoon a little more.”
The money they get from hunting is a source of extra income for the riverside people, who are mostly engaged in the countryside. Each week groups of up to 20 hunters arrive and each one pays them 500 pesos (about 25 dollars) to enter the lagoon. Being a regulated activity, it also leaves important resources destined to the conservation of wildlife, through the payment of the belts (hunting permits) to the Management Unit for the Use of Wildlife (UMA).
Villagers work on the removal of the lily from the lagoon. Photo: Uriel Gámez.
The diversity of flora and fauna is also used by restaurants in San Miguel Allende. Frogs, carp and acociles (river lobsters) are included in their menus. In the extension of the water mirror that reaches 1700 hectares it is common to see delimited areas and enabled as hatcheries, which are also threatened by the presence of lily, which competes with fish for oxygen.
There has also been an impact for tourism in the area. “Many realize that the routes are no longer as before. For example, if we talked about the small return to the lagoon, the routes have been shortened,” says Uriel Hernández, one of the boatmen.
One, two, three, five, ten, thousand, twenty thousand plants. The lily’s ability to reproduce makes it possible for its volume to double from one day to the next, says Ernesto Favela, a researcher at the Department of Biotechnology at the UAM’s Iztapalapa Unit.
The presence of the lily in the lagoon affects, among other things, the tourist activities in the place. Uriel Gamez.
Every day, the riverside people of San Miguel Allende extract up to 21 tons of lirior aquatic of the Laguna de Tecocomulco. It is a task that requires time. Those in the boats bring the plants closer to the shore, where other people wait with their bieldos to lift them. It is not an easy task, 80% of the plant is water, which increases its weight and makes it difficult to drag, which they carry out through tractors and trucks.
The water absorption capacity of the water lily is another concern of the riparian community. They fear that their presence will end up drying up the lagoon, a threat that is not new in the place that also suffers from dry seasons and the extraction of water for agricultural activities.
Since its declaration as a national property in 1929, the Tecocomulco lagoon, located in the hydrological region number 26 of the Panuco River, supplies water to communities of at least five municipalities of Hidalgo. The members of the community of San Miguel Allende accuse that a brewery located in the municipality of Irolo also depends on here.
“They want to make more wells, come and sell the water to Pachuca, take it further. They don’t help us clean it but they do want to benefit, that’s not worth it,” says Rufino Flores.
The water lily that was removed from the lagoon. Photo: Uriel Gámez.
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Possible solutions
The proliferation of water lily in Mexican water bodies has posed a challenge to authorities. In its report Improvement in the management of Invasive Exotic Aquatic Plants, IMTA gives an account of different strategies for their control. One of them is the one implemented in the Colorines Dam, in the State of Mexico. In 2015, the National Water Commission (Conagua) achieved the restoration of the water mirror, however, in the face of the resurgence of the problem, they established a program to monitor the presence of the water lily.
“There is physical control: the harvester and crusher boats. There is chemical control, with herbicides. There is biological control, using mainly insects of the genus Neochetina. They have tried to improve the proposal,” explains biologist Agustín Quiroz Flores, a researcher at the Institute of Biology of the UNAM.
The biological control to which the scientist refers was implemented in 1990 in infrastructure for irrigation. The scheme not only allowed the reduction of the lily in the risk districts, it also allowed to keep it under control, according to the report Biological control of the water lily in Mexico: first successful experience with neoquetinos in irrigation districts, prepared by IMTA.
Its effectiveness and efficiency in reducing the lily was found in all bodies of water. Similarly, it was shown that the re-infestation of the lily can be avoided, even for 16 continuous years.
“In this way, the biological control of the water lily stands as the only option to solve the problem at the national level in a cost-effective way and with enormous collateral benefits for society as a whole,” the document says.
The water lily is a plant that accumulates a lot of water. Photo: Uriel Gámez.
Unlike what happened in the irrigation districts, the characteristics of the lagoon, in terms of its biodiversity and hydrological importance, make it necessary that any action to be implemented has the approval of an Environmental Impact Statement by Semarnat, as explained by biologist Uriel Martínez.
“We already have the environmental authorization, but certain conditions apply, we can not use anything, for example, we can not put glyphosate or other herbicides. We can not put some biological controller because we do not have the way to estimate how impactful it can be for the rest of the species that inhabit here, “says the expert.
The possibilities of control of the lily in the Lagoon of Tecocomulco are reduced for different reasons: this body of water is the last living remnant of the lake system of the Valley of Mexico Basin; it is home to endangered species with protected status; It is a nesting place for aquatic and terrestrial birds, both migratory and Mexican and, since 2003, it is included in the list of wetlands considered of International Importance as part of the Ramsar convention.
Competition for oxygen from the water endangers fish, frogs, ducks and even other underwater plants in the lagoon. Photo: Uriel Gámez.
The axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanus), the royal duck (Chairina moschata) and the Montezuma leopard frog (Lithobates montezumae) are some of the endangered species that the lagoon houses. Protected birds such as the Mexican duck (Anas diazi), the swallow duck (Anos acutatzitzihoa) and the boludo duck (Caythia affinis) also inhabit. All of them are included in the list of priority species and populations for the protection of the Semarnat.
Moreover, according to criterion 4 of the Ramsar certification, in the lagoon there are 48 species of land birds, of which 27 are residents, 20 winter migratory and one summer migratory. To avoid damaging them in the cleaning work in the lagoon, a brigade travels the surface to verify that there are no nesting areas or species of flora and fauna that could be affected. If they are found, all of them are relocated to other spaces in the same lagoon.
For now, what is done in tecocomulco is the crushing of the plant. This process includes several stages: the machine passes several times through the most infested surfaces, once the grass is ground it is removed and taken to a deposit center.
Crushing machines are used to prevent the expansion of the lily in water bodies. Photo: Uriel Gámez.
The crushing technique faces criticism about its impact. Engineer Ernesto Favela points out that this action releases substances that could impact water quality. In addition, the sediments left by the crushing could extend their reproduction and complicate their control.
Biologist Uriel Martínez, for his part, considers that no impact is caused to the lagoon, since the waste generated by the crushing has no effect on the composition of the body of water.
“We have an environmental monitoring program and every certain period of time we carry out water quality sampling to evaluate how much it can tolerate or if it requires us to take other types of measures to reduce that impact,” says Martínez.
In order to remove the lily from the lagoon, the villagers use tractors. Photo: Uriel Gámez
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The sustainable way… is it possible?
A postcard taken from space on September 2, 2020 by the Earth Observatory of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shows the dimension of the problem that is lived with the water lily. For example, between 2010 and 2020, the presence of this plant extended to occupy 61% of the Valsequillo reserve, in the state of Puebla in Mexico. A situation that the Observatory detected in 20 other bodies of water in tropical areas around the world.
Despite this, in the problem of the water lily not everything is “bad news”, says NASA in its report Global Invasion of the Water Lily. The plant has an important potential for cleaning contaminated water, as it absorbs the nutrients that cause its pollution. This was proven by the researchers when calculating the amount of nutrients in reservoirs in South Africa and Brazil. The lily absorbed between 60% and 80% of the annual pollutant load. But its effectiveness depends on the level of contamination of the water body. In the case of the Valsequillo dam there was no success.
For Dr. Quiroz Flores, the ability of the water lily to survive in extreme conditions also makes it a candidate for its use in water treatment. This is an experiment that he says has at least eight decades of study.
The big problem is that controlling its expansion is so complicated that this possibility is still discussed.
NASA’s Earth Observatory captured the growth of the water lily in the Lagoon of Valsequillo, Puebla. The presence of the plant in the body of water is seen in red in these images.
Since the last century, Mexican governments have sought all kinds of solutions to the problem of the water lily in the country’s reservoirs. In 1976, in the canals of Xochimilco, Mexico City, the authorities introduced four manatees from the Grijalva River, in an attempt to stop the expansion of the lily through its channels. This is what Dr. Quiroz Flores recalls.
“Someone empirically said, ‘If in Brazil the manatee eats lily, we’re going to bring manatees here to Xochimilco.’ The manatees began to eat water lily, but when winter came the frosts began, with temperatures of 1 or 2 degrees Celsius and the animals died, “he recalls.
Today, proposals to curb the expansion of this plant are moving towards sustainability. On one side of the canoeing track of the Xochimilco canals, in Mexico City, the same point where the first plants were deposited a little more than a century ago, is the Center for Biological and Aquaculture Research of Cuemanco (CIBAC).
In the canals of Xochimilco, the water lily is also present. Photo: Uriel Gámez
There, Dr. Ernesto Favela, researcher at the Department of Biotechnology of the Iztapalapa Unit of the UAM, promoted a project to take advantage of the water lily and turn it into an input for agriculture and energy generation. Since 2019 and until April of this year, the engineer kept a biorefinery in operation, in which every week he processed up to two tons of water lily to transform it into nanocrystals, enzymes, compost and biogas.
“Here in Xochimilco, and I imagine that all over the country, you can give the water lily three destinations. The cheapest is to throw it at the water’s edge, but you create mountains of lily that are going to rot and that’s not business,” he says. A second option, he says, is the one they make in Xochimilco: a part is delivered for use as fertilizer in the chinampas, but the problem is that there is so much lily that it is not possible to distribute everything. “The third destination, which is more or less fine, is that they fill trucks and take them to depot centers.”
The potential of the water lily as an agro-sustainable fertilizer was developed in the CIBAC facilities. There is still arranged the machinery through which, Favela and his team carried out the runoff and crushing of the plant for its transformation into compost and vermicompost, which meet the specifications of the Official Mexican Standard.
Dr. Ernesto Favela, researcher at the Department of Biotechnology of the Iztapalapa Unit of the UAM. Photo: Bianca Carretto.
The entire process of transforming lily fiber into fertilizer takes two months. “It’s not a substitute for soil, it’s an additive… The problem of the lily is national, it is big, we have to do a large-scale project,” explains Favela.
But this is not the only proposal. In the country there are already other efforts to take advantage of this invasive plant and one of them was developed by the company Temas, Servicios y Productos Ambientales. After 15 years of research he developed a technique to take advantage of the absorbent capacity of the lily in oil spills and the eventual release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Despite the advances in its control and use, the proliferation of the water lily does not stop. For example, the Peñitas Dam, one of the four controlled by the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), on the Grijalva River, Chiapas, is another example of its economic affectations. In the last three years, the state-owned company has invested 60 million pesos (more than 3 million dollars) in measures to contain its expansion and avoid problems with hydroelectric power generation.
” it begins to invade the areas until it also affects the work of taking the hydroelectric plants and affects their production. So far not because we have immediately been looking for the solution for the eviction and use of the lily,” says Carlos Morales Mar, director of Operations of the CFE and commissioner of dams of the Grijalva River.
The compost produced by CIBAC researchers complies with the provisions of the Official Mexican Environmental Standard. Photo: Uriel Gámez.
Last year, personnel from the CFE and other federal agencies removed 27,000 cubic meters of water lily from the dam, which has been used for use as compost within the government’s Sembrando Vida program, which consists of planting timber and fruit trees in areas with high rates of poverty and marginalization.
According to engineer Favela, given the enormous volume of water lily in Mexican bodies of water, the central thing is to look for how to make useful and profitable products.
Although there have been efforts to eradicate the water lily, the constant is that in all of them there is a resurgence of the problem. Both the scientists and the authorities consulted in this report agree that, for now, there is no other way than to maintain permanent monitoring and implement strategies aimed at the control and use of this plant that in Mexico became one of its worst “weeds”.
This report is a journalistic alliance between Mongabay Latam and IMER Noticias de México and you can consult it here.
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