How the Invasive Water Hyacinth Is Threatening Fishermen’s Livelihoods on a Popular Kenyan Lake

 A heron searches for food next to abandoned fishing boats trapped in hyacinth at Central Beach in Lake Naivasha in Nakuru county, Kenya's Rift Valley, Friday, Dec. 13, 2024. (AP)
A heron searches for food next to abandoned fishing boats trapped in hyacinth at Central Beach in Lake Naivasha in Nakuru county, Kenya's Rift Valley, Friday, Dec. 13, 2024. (AP)
TT

How the Invasive Water Hyacinth Is Threatening Fishermen’s Livelihoods on a Popular Kenyan Lake

 A heron searches for food next to abandoned fishing boats trapped in hyacinth at Central Beach in Lake Naivasha in Nakuru county, Kenya's Rift Valley, Friday, Dec. 13, 2024. (AP)
A heron searches for food next to abandoned fishing boats trapped in hyacinth at Central Beach in Lake Naivasha in Nakuru county, Kenya's Rift Valley, Friday, Dec. 13, 2024. (AP)

For someone who fishes for a living, nothing says a bad day like spending over 18 hours on a lake and taking home nothing.

Recently, a group of fishermen were said to be stranded on Kenya's popular Lake Naivasha for that long and blamed the water hyacinth that has taken over large parts of it.

“They did not realize that the hyacinth would later entrap them,” said fellow fisherman Simon Macharia. The men even lost their nets, he said.

The water hyacinth is native to South America and was reportedly introduced to Kenya in the 1980s “by tourists who brought it as an ornamental plant,” said Gordon Ocholla, an environmental scientist at Mount Kenya University.

Water hyacinth was first sighted on Lake Naivasha about 10 years ago. Now it has become a large, glossy mat that can cover swathes of the lake. To fishermen, the invasive plant is a threat to livelihoods.

Usually, the presence of water hyacinth is linked to pollution. It is known to thrive in the presence of contaminants and grows quickly, and is considered the most invasive aquatic plant species in the world, Ocholla said. It can prevent the penetration of sunlight and impact airflow, affecting the quality of aquatic life.

This has caused a drastic drop in the population of fish in Lake Naivasha and some other affected areas.

The East African Journal of Environment and Natural Resources estimated in a 2023 study that the invasion of water hyacinth in Kenyan lakes — including Africa's largest lake, Lake Victoria — has led to annual losses of between $150 million and $350 million in Kenya's fishing, transport and tourism sectors.

The fishermen at Lake Naivasha know that well.

“Previously we would catch up to 90 kilograms (198 pounds) of fish per day, but nowadays we get between 10 kilograms and 15 kilograms,” Macharia said.

This means daily earnings have dropped from $210 to $35.

Fishermen say they have tried to tackle the invasion of water hyacinth but with little success.

“It grows back faster than we can remove it,” Macharia said.

There are several ways to deal with the plant, including physically removing it, Ocholla said. Another method is introducing organisms that feed on it. Or chemicals can be sprayed to kill the plant, “but this is not favorable as it would harm other aquatic life.”

Several attempts have been made to convert the plant into a useful commodity.

“The government had built a biogas processor near the lake where we were supposed to take the hyacinth, but it has never been operational,” Macharia said. He did not know why.

Recently the fishermen, through a Kenyan start-up, began using a method that converts water hyacinth into biodegradable packaging.

HyaPak started in 2022 as a project at Egerton University in Kenya. It seeks to create environmentally friendly packaging.

“On one hand there is a problem of water hyacinth, and a problem of plastic waste pollution on the other. What we are trying to do is using one problem, the hyacinth, to solve the plastic waste pollution,” HyaPak founder Joseph Nguthiru said.

He said he created the project following a disastrous field excursion that left him and his classmates stuck on Lake Naivasha.

HyaPak has entered a partnership with the fishermen, who harvest the water hyacinth and sun-dry it for a negotiable fee. Then it is transported to the Kenya Industrial Research and Development Institute in Nairobi, where HyaPak is located.

There, it is mixed with what Nguthiru called “proprietary additives” and converted into biodegradable paper material.

HyaPak is targeting the agriculture sector, creating biodegradable bags for seedlings. The bags decompose with time, releasing nutrients that Nguthiru said are beneficial to the plants.

HyaPak works with 50 fishermen at Lake Naivasha, including Macharia. The company said it processes up to 150 kilograms of water hyacinth per week, converting it to 4,500 biodegradable packages.

Experts said scaling up such work will be a challenge.

“Such solutions and others that have been applied by similar start-ups may be promising and actually work, but if they cannot be scaled to a higher level that matches the invasiveness of the water hyacinth, then the problem will still persist,” Ocholla said.



US FAA Probes Reports of SpaceX Rocket Debris Landing in Turks and Caicos

SpaceX's Starship rocket is pictured after launching as seen from South Padre Island near Brownsville, Texas, US January 16, 2025. REUTERS/Gabriel V. Cardenas
SpaceX's Starship rocket is pictured after launching as seen from South Padre Island near Brownsville, Texas, US January 16, 2025. REUTERS/Gabriel V. Cardenas
TT

US FAA Probes Reports of SpaceX Rocket Debris Landing in Turks and Caicos

SpaceX's Starship rocket is pictured after launching as seen from South Padre Island near Brownsville, Texas, US January 16, 2025. REUTERS/Gabriel V. Cardenas
SpaceX's Starship rocket is pictured after launching as seen from South Padre Island near Brownsville, Texas, US January 16, 2025. REUTERS/Gabriel V. Cardenas

The US Federal Aviation Administration and officials from the Turks and Caicos Islands have launched probes into SpaceX's explosive Starship rocket test that sent debris streaking over the northern Caribbean and forced airlines to divert dozens of flights.

"There are no reports of public injury, and the FAA is working with SpaceX and appropriate authorities to confirm reports of public property damage on Turks and Caicos," said the FAA, which oversees private rocket launch activity, according to Reuters.

An upgraded version of SpaceX's Starship exploded in space over the Bahamas roughly eight minutes into the company's seventh flight test from Texas on Thursday. It sent fields of blazing debris for miles across the sky over the Turks and Caicos, a British Overseas Territory.

Residents in the South and North Caicos islands described to Reuters intense rumbling that shook the ground and said they received messages from friends in North Caicos who found charred pieces of what they believed to be Starship debris.

"My mirror and the walls were shaking," said Veuleiri Artiles, a woman who was working in South Caicos when the debris fell. "It was like when you're on an airplane... my ears were rattling."

"It felt like an earthquake," said Ibalor Calucin, who lives on the territory's Providenciales island. "It was scary... all of the people here in our apartment ran to the parking lot."

There is a "multi-agency investigation that is ongoing" into the Starship explosion, the commissioner of the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force, Fitz Bailey, told Reuters. He declined to comment on reports of public property damage from the debris.

The rumbling was from the many orange-glowing shards of debris from Starship's explosion that were breaking the sound barrier as they plunged through the atmosphere, sending loud booms thundering across the islands, according to seismic ground sensor data analyzed by Benjamin Fernando, a seismology researcher at Johns Hopkins University.

The rumbling in the ground "was about 10 millimeters per second, which is actually quite a lot," Fernando said. "That's a relatively substantial ground motion. It's comparable to a small earthquake."

The Starship rocket that exploded had multiple new onboard features flying for the first time and carried its first batch of mock satellites that were meant to be deployed in space.

SpaceX's Starship system launched from Boca Chica, Texas at 5:37 p.m. ET (2237 GMT) Thursday, flying east over the Gulf of Mexico. Starship separated from its Super Heavy booster as planned at 64 km (40 miles) in altitude, igniting its six engines to blast deeper into space.

The rocket was bound for a suborbital trajectory around Earth to re-enter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean and attempt a propulsive landing on the water's surface.

But SpaceX lost communication with the rocket soon after its separation from Super Heavy and later confirmed its demise.

"Initial data indicates a fire developed in the aft section of the ship, leading to a rapid unscheduled disassembly," SpaceX said in a statement on its website.