Santa Cruz Island
Tuesday morning saw us pulling into Academy Bay on Santa Cruz Island, ready for an exciting day visiting the world-renowned Charles Darwin Research Centre, the bustling port town of Puerto Ayora and the lush highlands of one of the archipelago’s largest islands. The walk into the research station is fascinating, as it constitutes both a kind of botanical garden and a great area for birding.
By the landing dock is the only specimen of button mangrove (Conocarpus erectus) we’ve seen on our travels around the enchanted islands. Galapagos is home to four mangrove species that line the coastlines of all the islands with brilliant green, a stark contrast to the arid interior of the islands.
Mangrove forests are found throughout the tropics and subtropics of the world, and are probably the most unappreciated of ecosystems. Even Charles Darwin, with his great love for the natural world, saw no beauty there: “the bright green colour of these bushes reminded me of the rank grass in a churchyard: both are nourished by putrid exhalations; the one speaks of death past, the other too often of death to come”! Regardless of this, they are immensely important in coastal ecology and in the health of our seas and coastlines around the world, as they provide important nurseries, breeding grounds, prevent erosion, protect from tropical storms, to mention just a few of their roles. It is a real tragedy that this lack of appreciation of their importance has led them to be cut down along huge sections of the world’s coastline, mainly for the establishment of shrimp farms. Ecuador in fact has lost about 85% of it’s mangrove forests to this destructive practice; only to have the fishery collapse on itself once the shrimp lost their natural breeding grounds – environmental disasters such as these are the reason none of our vessels serve shrimp anymore.
Mangroves do not form a distinct taxonomic group: the different species are not genetically related to one another, but are grouped together because they fill a particular niche (or ecological role), and a very difficult one at that: the land-water interface where they use salt water for life! This ability to live in salt or brackish water has been accomplished in a number of different ways amongst the mangroves. Red mangroves, easily recognizable by their spectacular prop roots, live furthest from land and are exposed to the highest concentrations of salt: they are the pioneering mangrove. This plant overcomes the salinity problem by using “preventive medicine”: stopping the salt from entering altogether by reverse osmosis in the root system. The differential salt tolerance of mangroves leads to a zonation in their vertical distribution along the shoreline – black and white mangroves cannot prevent the salt from entering their system, but later eliminate it through special pores on the leaves, thus have lower tolerance and occur closer to land. The button mangrove occurs furthest from water, between the mangrove and terrestrial area, in fact is not a true mangrove.
Tuesday morning saw us pulling into Academy Bay on Santa Cruz Island, ready for an exciting day visiting the world-renowned Charles Darwin Research Centre, the bustling port town of Puerto Ayora and the lush highlands of one of the archipelago’s largest islands. The walk into the research station is fascinating, as it constitutes both a kind of botanical garden and a great area for birding.
By the landing dock is the only specimen of button mangrove (Conocarpus erectus) we’ve seen on our travels around the enchanted islands. Galapagos is home to four mangrove species that line the coastlines of all the islands with brilliant green, a stark contrast to the arid interior of the islands.
Mangrove forests are found throughout the tropics and subtropics of the world, and are probably the most unappreciated of ecosystems. Even Charles Darwin, with his great love for the natural world, saw no beauty there: “the bright green colour of these bushes reminded me of the rank grass in a churchyard: both are nourished by putrid exhalations; the one speaks of death past, the other too often of death to come”! Regardless of this, they are immensely important in coastal ecology and in the health of our seas and coastlines around the world, as they provide important nurseries, breeding grounds, prevent erosion, protect from tropical storms, to mention just a few of their roles. It is a real tragedy that this lack of appreciation of their importance has led them to be cut down along huge sections of the world’s coastline, mainly for the establishment of shrimp farms. Ecuador in fact has lost about 85% of it’s mangrove forests to this destructive practice; only to have the fishery collapse on itself once the shrimp lost their natural breeding grounds – environmental disasters such as these are the reason none of our vessels serve shrimp anymore.
Mangroves do not form a distinct taxonomic group: the different species are not genetically related to one another, but are grouped together because they fill a particular niche (or ecological role), and a very difficult one at that: the land-water interface where they use salt water for life! This ability to live in salt or brackish water has been accomplished in a number of different ways amongst the mangroves. Red mangroves, easily recognizable by their spectacular prop roots, live furthest from land and are exposed to the highest concentrations of salt: they are the pioneering mangrove. This plant overcomes the salinity problem by using “preventive medicine”: stopping the salt from entering altogether by reverse osmosis in the root system. The differential salt tolerance of mangroves leads to a zonation in their vertical distribution along the shoreline – black and white mangroves cannot prevent the salt from entering their system, but later eliminate it through special pores on the leaves, thus have lower tolerance and occur closer to land. The button mangrove occurs furthest from water, between the mangrove and terrestrial area, in fact is not a true mangrove.
