Water Hyacinth

Water hyacinth can double its population every 6-14 days under optimal conditions. A single plant can produce 3,000 others in 50 days. This exponential growth lets it cover entire lakes, rivers, and reservoirs with dense mats that block sunlight, deoxygenate water, and destroy aquatic ecosystems. Native to the Amazon, it's now considered one of the world's worst invasive species.

The growth mechanism is pure vegetative cloning. Each plant produces daughter plants from stolons; each daughter produces more daughters. No flowering, no pollination, no seed dispersal required - just continuous splitting and spreading. The plant bypassed the reproductive bottleneck that limits most species by making reproduction essentially continuous.

Water hyacinth's buoyancy allows expansion without substrate constraints. Unlike land plants that need root space, water hyacinth floats, constrained only by water surface area. Combined with its doubling rate, this means colonization speed limited only by how fast the surface area can be covered. A 10-acre lake can go from clear to completely covered in weeks.

The business parallel is the power of frictionless replication. Products and services that can replicate without bottlenecks - software, digital content, franchise models - can grow at water hyacinth rates when they find favorable conditions. The lesson is identifying and eliminating replication constraints: what's the equivalent of needing seeds or substrate that slows your expansion?