Botanical atlas

Botryococcus (Boghead Algae)

Botryococcus braunii

Botryococcus braunii has no place in traditional herbal medicine, but it holds a quiet, remarkable history all its own. This tiny green alga has been quietly at work for hundreds of millions of years, its oil-laden colonies sinking to lake and sea beds and slowly compacting into some of the world's richest oil shale and boghead coal deposits, including the coorongite found along Australia's Coorong lagoon and the torbanite mined in Scotland. In recent decades scientists have turned back to this same alga with fresh eyes, growing it in ponds and bioreactors in the hope that what nature once took eons to do underground, we might learn to do again on the surface, cleanly and quickly, as a renewable source of oil.

Safety.

This alga has no history as a food and no human safety data, so it should never be gathered and eaten. Ponds where it grows can also host toxic cyanobacteria blooms that are easily mistaken for it, so any wild pond scum is best left untouched.