The Creature From The Green Lagoon,

is making them into black lagoons,

Caddo Lake in Texas is suffering under an alien invasion, giant salvinia was imported from South America as an ornamental plant for aquariums and lawn ponds, but some escaped in 1998 and invaded a Houston pond, in 2006 it started moving from lake to lake and has marched on relentlessly to become the scourge of Texas wetlands,

 Australian researchers have calculated that, given the right conditions, an M&M-size salvinia plant could blanket 39 square miles of water in just over three months! as the advancing front reaches maturity, it swells into a carpet of vegetation up to three feet thick, smothering other life in its path by consuming nutrients and blocking sunlight from penetrating the water below, fish can’t survive, native plants and amphibians struggle, lake recreation halts as viny roots clog boat engines and become ensnared in propeller blades, 

in some areas, the dense layer of salvinia can even become a substrate for other opportunistic weeds, making it difficult to tell where the lake ends and the shore begins, people who live among the lakes have tried many ways to control salvinia: sweeping it up in nets, building barriers, and even blow-torching it, 

 but it appears there is a natural way to control the plants spread, importing weevils seems to be the best bet, but even that program has drawbacks: lack of government funding, a climate that salvinia survives better than weevils, and the fact that importing one invasive species to get rid of another can have devastating consequences, but in this case the idea seems to be working, after months of fund-raising, the Greater Caddo Lake Association began construction on its very own climate-controlled weevil-production facility, in August 2014 it hosted a ribbon cutting for the Morley Hudson Weevil Greenhouse, appropriately located in the town of Uncertain, Uncertain is a community of about one hundred, on the lake’s western shore, and perhaps more than that of any other Caddo hamlet, its future hinges on the health of the lake, above is a picture Daren Horton harvesting weevils at the greenhouse in Uncertain,

volunteers are now releasing weevils into Lane’s Hidden Pond, where the salvinia appears to be dying, on July 13, 2017, where We can only hope that the insects do their work and more funding to combat this menace is given, for a much more detailed look at this problem have a look here at Texas Monthly in an article by Laura Beil.