Published: February 2007Mangroves
By Kennedy Warne
Photograph by Tim Laman
Mangroves live life on the edge. With one foot on land and one in the sea, these botanical amphibians occupy a zone of desiccating heat, choking mud, and salt levels that would kill an ordinary plant within hours. Yet the forests mangroves form are among the most productive and biologically complex ecosystems on Earth. Birds roost in the canopy, shellfish attach themselves to the roots, and snakes and crocodiles come to hunt. Mangroves provide nursery grounds for fish; a food source for monkeys, deer, tree-climbing crabs, even kangaroos; and a nectar source for bats and honeybees.
As a group, mangroves can’t be defined too closely. There are some 70 species from two dozen families—among them palm, hibiscus, holly, plumbago, acanthus, legumes, and myrtle. They range from prostrate shrubs to 200-foot-high (60 meters) timber trees. Though most prolific in Southeast Asia, where they are thought to have originated, mangroves circle the globe. Most live within 30 degrees of the Equator, but a few hardy types have adapted to temperate climates, and one lives as far from the tropical sun as New Zealand. Wherever they live, they share one thing in common: They’re brilliant adapters. Each mangrove has an ultrafiltration system to keep much of the salt out and a complex root system that allows it to survive in the intertidal zone. Some have snorkel-like roots called pneumatophores that stick out of the mud to help them take in air; others use prop roots or buttresses to keep their trunks upright in the soft sediments at tide’s edge.
These plants are also landbuilders par excellence. Some Aborigines in northern Australia believe one mangrove species resembles their primal ancestor, Giyapara, who walked across the mudflats and brought the tree into existence. The plants’ interlocking roots stop riverborne sediments from coursing out to sea, and their trunks and branches serve as a palisade that diminishes the erosive power of waves.
Despite their strategic importance, mangroves are under threat worldwide. They are sacrificed for salt pans, aquaculture ponds, housing developments, roads, port facilities, hotels, golf courses, and farms. And they die from a thousand indirect cuts: oil spills, chemical pollution, sediment overload, and disruption of their sensitive water and salinity balance. Calls for mangrove conservation gained a brief but significant hearing following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Where mangrove forests were intact, they served as natural breakwaters, dissipating the energy of the waves, mitigating property damage, perhaps saving lives. Post-tsunami, the logic of allowing a country’s mangrove “bioshields” to be bulldozed looked not just flawed but reprehensible.
Bangladesh has not lost sight of that logic, putting a great premium on the ability of mangroves to stabilize shores and trap sediments. A low-lying country with a long, vulnerable coastline, Bangladesh is also land starved, with a crushing population density of 2,500 persons per square mile (2.6 square kilometers). By planting mangroves on delta sediments washed down from the Himalaya, it has gained over 300,000 acres (120,000 hectares) of new land on the Bay of Bengal. The plantings are relatively new, but there have been mangroves here for as long as the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers have been draining into the bay. The vast tidal woodland they form is known as the Sundarbans—literally “beautiful forest.” Today, it’s the largest surviving single tract of mangroves in the world.
In the forest’s most luxuriant sections a dozen mangrove species, from feathery golpata palms to the towering sundri tree, form labyrinthine stands up to 60 feet (18 meters) tall. Beneath the sundri, the glutinous mud bristles with the tree’s breathing roots. Twelve inches high (30 centimeters) and as thick as deer antlers, they grow so tightly together there’s barely room to squeeze a foot between them. In drier areas, groves of semi-deciduous mangroves blaze red in the months before the monsoon. Spotted deer glide through the filtered shade, stopping abruptly when a troop of macaques shriek an alarm call. Woodpeckers hammer in the high branches, while on the forest floor dry leaves rustle with the scuttling of mud crabs. A butterfly called the Sundarban crow—charcoal with splashes of white—rests on a twig, opening and closing its wings like a prayer book.
Evening falls with the junk junk junk sound of nightjars, then all is quiet. Night belongs to the tiger. These forests provide one of the last remaining haunts for the Bengal tiger and its only saltwater habitat. According to local tradition, the tiger’s name, bagh, must never be uttered. To speak it is to summon it. So people talk of mamu, uncle. Uncle tiger, lord of the Sundarbans.
(责任编辑：威展小王)
