Duckweed is a great nitrate absorbing sponge. It spreads like wildfire, it's almost impossible to get rid of,... but it's a nuisance to dip your hands in the tank. If you have aquatic plants it can actually block out the light to them and starve them out.
I've got a 75g with a ton of duckweed. Its so thick I have to scoop it out all the time. Big Huge clumps of it. It's pretty cool that you're basically removing nitrates by hand lol.
My dad used it for decades as a nitrate reducer when he bred fish. It provides good cover for fry too.
A word of caution though - large fish will eat it. It won't take to some tanks for this reason. My gouramis and silver dollars would devour it. (I often scoop out duckweed from one tank and feed it to my large aggressive cichlids.) It's hard to get rid of. It does best with very minimal flow or surface agitation, you want something like at least an airstone or something to keep it from totally covering the surface of the water and preventing gas exchange.
It's a cool plant and is gaining popularity with waste water processing facilities, alot of talapia breeders use it for water purification and in turn feed it to the talapia
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