journey through mangroves

[asakiyume]

Why do I love mangroves? Because they grow between water and land, between saltwater and fresh. They protect coasts from hurricanes; they're like above-water coral reefs; they are all a-tangle. And they have weird and wonderful traits.

Here's what Marjory Stoneman Douglas said about them:

Two kinds of mangroves dominate … the black and the red. It begins on the last peat with tall hammocks and forests of buttonwoods, called “white mangrove,” not a true mangrove at all but Conocarpus. Then in the first level of the high tide stands deep-rooted the black mangrove, the Avicennia nitida, not tall but thick, which often sends from its submerged roots up through two or three feet of mud and water the curious pneumatophores, like thousands of sharp bristling sticks, most difficult to wade through. They are breathing organs. The darg-green leaves above them often exude salt crystals. The roots stain the water brown with strong tannin.

Beyond that, marching out into the tides low or high, and rooted deep below them in marl over the rock, goes the great Rhizophora, the red mangrove, on its thousands of acres of entwined, buttressed and bracing gray arches. The huge trunks, often seven feet in circumference, stand as high as eighty feet.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass, 50th Anniversary Edition (Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press, 1997), 55–56.

You see what looks like a tiny forest of sticks in the photo below? Those are the pneumatophores, helping the black mangroves breathe.



But most of my pictures are of red mangroves, with their arching prop roots and their torpedo seeds:

prop roots


torpedo seeds hanging down




What I've always wanted to do on mangroves:




tall (but a skinny baby compared to the ones Marjory Stoneman Douglas described)


And fencelike:



Borderland plants


A mangrove tunnel



And--blurry--a crocodile among the mangroves!

Comments

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yes, most of them were taken in Hollywood, Florida, while we were kayaking, but a couple were taken from a boat when we went on a "backcountry" tour in Everglades National Park, at the bottommost tip of Florida.