In the brightest Florida morning and in the starkest, shadeless afternoon there is one place where the fish gather like sleepy worker-bee colleagues – the mangroves. If you’ve ever been boating and felt as though the sun was about to bake you, entering the cool mangroves is a blessed relief beyond expression. Our wildlife feels the same way; the mangroves are home to everything from alligators and raccoons to ibis and anhingas, not to mention hermit crabs, mussels and soft sponges. In Florida there are black, white, silver and red mangroves. They are an incredibly tolerant plant and can live in both fresh and salt water. Florida mangroves are actually trees that are considered tropical to subtropical. Mangroves live where it isn’t quite land and isn’t quite ocean; they require the perfect amount of sea water. If they have too little they dry out; too much and they drown. Mangroves store more carbon than terrestrial forests. They have the capacity to take far more carbon out of the atmosphere than terrestrial forests; a patch of mangroves could absorb as much as 10 times the carbon of a similarly-sized patch of terrestrial forest. It may seem like there is an endless amount of them as you pass through the narrow corridors of our local waterways and along the vast expanse of coast on our bays and sounds, but in fact we have lost about 86 percent of them in some areas since the 1940s. Imagine what it once was the next time you get on the boat and start exploring, and imagine how dense they must have been. Mangroves serve several incredibly important purposes in the coastal Florida ecosystem. They not only provide habitat for birds, animals and fish By Marcy Shortuse 60GASPARILLA ISLAND July/August 2017
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