Invasive plant found at Millwood

Giant salvinia, a harmful aquatic plant, was discovered in December at Lake Millwood by staff of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission and Army Corps of Engineers.

This is the fourth known location in southern Arkansas infected by the aquatic invasive species.

Eric Brinkman, fisheries supervisor in the Hope office of Game and Fish, said biologists collected several small clusters of the plant near Jack’s Isle along Little River. No large mats of the plant have been found yet, but it only takes a single piece to become an issue once the weather warms.

“It may look small at first, but this plant grows and reproduces extremely fast,” Brinkman said. “Under ideal conditions in warm weather, it can double in size in less than a week, and nearly every fragment of the plant can create a new mat.”

Giant salvinia looks similar to duckweed but is much larger and grows in large clumps. The free-floating plant has leaves between 1 to 2 inches wide. Individual plants group together to form large floating mats that can impede boating as well as crowd out other plants and animals. When left unchecked, they can choke out everything else.

“These mats can completely block all access to the water underneath,” Brinkman said. “They can get so dense a person could stand on them, so they are a serious issue.”

Brinkman said Game and Fish and Corps will conduct a larger search to locate any more mats of the vegetation to spray or remove them.

Giant salvinia has continued a slow crawl across southern Arkansas since it was first detected in Smith Park Lake near Fouke in 2017. Its most likely source of transmission is hitching a ride on recreational equipment such as boats, trailers, duck-hunting decoys and other objects that are moved to different bodies of water during the year.