A PRIVATE environmental group has started removing water hyacinths clogging the Cagayan de Oro river, Friday morning, June 24.
"Attraction unta kini sa atong suba kay nindot kaayo iyang dahon, but once mudaghan siya, naa gihapon diay ni-threat sa atong suba," Dr. Rosalina Huerbana, executive director of Liceo's Safer River, said.
Huerbana said the university has been conducting river cleanups for the past five months.
Huerbana said 22 riverside barangays have so far collaborated with the foundation aiming to maintain the cleanup campaign in the river.
According to the water hyacinth facts compiled by Astrid Cinco, research coordinator of Xavier University's Kinaadman Research Center (KRC), the invasive plant has "special adaptations" allowing it to grow rapidly in still or slow-moving freshwater.
Cinco said water hyacinths can withstand extremes of nutrient supply, pH level, temperature, and even grow in toxic water.
Under ideal conditions, a single plant of a water lily can produce 3,000 others within 50 days, and cover an area of 600 square meters in just a year, she said.
Aside from completely clogging the river, Cinco said it disrupts all life on the water, ruin fishing grounds, block irrigation canals, and deprive aquatic plants of sunlight and animals of oxygenated water.
Water lilies can also be breeding grounds for pests as its floating mats support organisms that are detrimental to health, such as breeding habitat for malaria, mosquitoes, snails carrying schistosomiasis, and implicated as an agent of cholera, she added.
But while science may treat the plant as an enemy, the City Local Environment and Natural Resources Office (Clenro) harvests the plants to use as feedstock for cattle and goats to farms in Kinawe, Libona town in Bukidnon and some parts of Misamis Oriental.
Clenro Chief Edwin Dael said the water hyacinths have turned out to be blessings in disguise for livestock animals that have nothing to eat due to the long dryspell brought about by the El Niño.
Dael said the plant contains 10 percent of protein and 90 percent of water which are healthy components for animals.