World of Wonder: Wolffia -The Toast

Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s previous World of Wonder columns can be found here.

Thanks everyone for your patience while I hit pause on the column for a bit. Me and my trusty intern, Haiku the Wonder Chihuahua, are back to our regularly scheduled wonders after a bit of a mid-semester and AWP conference hiatus.

This week, I give you the world’s tiniest flower: Wolffia, otherwise known as watermeal.

Each plant is almost spherical—more football-ish actually— with a single minute flower inside a small hollow in the center of the lime-green “football.” After it gets pollinated, it grows a tiny fruit with a tiny single seed inside, which of course holds the record for the world’s smallest fruit.

Just how tiny is this itty-bitty flower? A single plant is about the size of half a sesame seed, with the flower tucked inside the green. And about four of those flowers are about the size of a single grain of table salt. I like to imagine beetles collecting a whole bouquet of wolffia flowers for a wee insect wedding in June. Besides being pretty darn cute, wolffia are chock-full of protein—I mean like 40% protein, so don’t knock it till you try it in a sandwich or side-dish.

Wolffia flowers reproduce quickly, so if my imaginary beetle wedding were, say, a three-day affair, the flowers would double in number with no leaf or stem to get in their way. At this rate, in theory, a single wolffia plant could produce almost one nonillion plants just during the summer months. And when is the last time you saw a nonillion of anything alive?

And now it’s your turn, Wonder-ful peoples! I have a wider question for you all just on the heels of Earth Day: What was the last animal or plant that truly made you feel WONDER when you cast your bright and brave eye upon it?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Lucky Fish. She is a professor of English and teaches poetry and environmental lit at a small college in Western New York. She is obsessed with peacocks, jellyfish, and school supplies. Follow her on Twitter: @aimeenez.

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GreenGrasses 121p · 518 weeks ago

Glad to see you back! I feel a sense of wonder when I look at my tiny marimo balls in their glass container! I like to imagine that I'll grow them to be the size of basketballs one day.

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2 replies · active 518 weeks ago

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gripyfish 109p · 518 weeks ago

Thanks to this comment, I looked up marimo balls (I had never heard of them!) and now I am entranced and may need to get some of my own.

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Mahaiwe · 518 weeks ago

Oh man, now I miss my marimo. I have the approximate attention span of a concussed gnat and while I don't quite have a black thumb, I shouldn't be trusted with houseplants... still, I was religious about changing its water every week, and rolling it around its jar every day, and generally treated it more like a pet than a plant. It rotted from the inside out on me :C

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blueathena623 93p · 518 weeks ago

Probably last evening when I was squinting at the flying objects flitting in the dusk, trying to figure out if they were birds and bats. Doesn't sound like much, but when I got in my car I saw that I had lost close to half an hour.

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1 reply · active 518 weeks ago

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Apollonia · 518 weeks ago

I love losing time really looking at things in nature that you so often just walk by. I spent about 40 minutes watching a golden orb spider spin a web yesterday. It was fascinating and incredibly calming at the same time.

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halloweenjack64 115p · 518 weeks ago

If you could shrink down to Ant-Man size, and were with an ant eating a single wolffia fruit, would it be cute, or horrifying, or cutely horrifying, or horrifyingly cute?

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bmorganjoy 93p · 518 weeks ago

"don't knock it till you try it in a sandwich or side-dish"
so my impulsive desire to put it in my mouth is backed by actual nutritional content on top of what looks to be an utterly delightful texture. incredible!
Sign. Me. Up.
Seriously, where can I find this for human consumption, please?

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1 reply · active 518 weeks ago

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