Mangroves, Mud and Myopics

Mud, mud, glorious mud,
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
So follow me, follow,
Down to the hollow,
And there let us wallow in glo-o-o-orious mud.The Hippopotamus Song by Flanders and Swan

No hippopotami convening in my neck of the woods, but I do have an affinity with, or rather a passion for, mud. 

Living near the coast in Queensland, in the northern (and therefore warm and tropical to subtropical) top half of Australia, means access to good beaches and warm water. But coastal areas in warm climes also mean the presence of coastal rivers, estuaries and bays, with large deposits of mud, where you'll find mud, and where you'll also find ..... the magnificent mangrove forest.  

Here in Oz we have just under 12,000 square kilometres (approximately 5,000 square miles) of mangroves, of which just under 5,000 square kilometres are located along the Queensland coast.

Over the last few decades, mangrove environments, worldwide, have been disappearing.  This is due to a number of factors, including the following: 

• overenthusiastic coastal development, often verging on ignorance, with so called man-made construction and decimation of mangroves often being seen as an 'improvement', particularly in areas of naturally intertidal acid sulfate muddy soil, where the occasional natural 'whiff' of hydrogen sulphide (rotten eggs gas) is misinterpreted as a decaying, instead of healthy, environment;            

• exploitation of the timber as a source of fuel wood; and
• perhaps the historically most common and important reason for removing the mangrove, for its bark, which is peeled to extract tannin, used as a dye in the leather industry.   

It follows that many of our planet's coastal developers, along with many of the 'worldly-wise' planners, upon whom we depend to provide guidance and controls for development, often demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the importance of .....

" ..... the structure and function of mangrove communities, their value and the need for conservation of this often underestimated resource."
Catherine Lovelock in "Field Guide to the Mangroves of Queensland"

• Is this just another pitiful and unsustained call to arms from the green movement?  
• What are the benefits, if any, of these muddy coastal ecosystems, so obviously inclement and alien to our preferred human performance palette of dry solid stable ground? and
• What happens when we remove and 'improve' this soggy wet impenetrable maze of coastal leafy clutter?

 

A teaspoon of mud from a north Queensland mangrove forest contains more than 10 billion bacteria.  These densities are among the highest to be found in marine mud anywhere in the world and are an indication of the immensely high productivity of this coastal habitat.  
- WetlandInfo Dept of Environment and Science, Queensland

These bacteria interact with leaf litter and fungi, present within the mangrove mud 'garden', and are a food source for crabs, fish and prawns.  These marine creatures, in turn, produce waste which contributes to the nourishment of molluscs and small crustaceans, and, when the waste goes into solution,  plankton are nourished.  And so the food chain goes round and round, and includes worms and other small 'fisherman bait' towards the bottom end, with wading birds and sea birds at the heavier and more readily visible end, as pictorially presented in this slide 'borrowed' from an unreferenced source while surfing the net.

If you take some time out to peruse the following shots, taken while I was exploring the various more sheltered parts of the Brisbane shoreline, I think you'll "get the picture" of some of the diverse community dependent upon the Moreton Bay mangroves.  But please bear in mind that this is only a very small sample of some of the vibrant bird and aqueous wildlife, which either depends upon, or comes to visit, the many trees, shrubs and occasional palms which comprise the mangrove forest.

So if we remove the mangroves we tamper with a large and vibrant, although mostly hidden, food chain.  Furthermore, the humble mangrove provides some protection to the shoreline against storm-driven waves and wind.  This protection tends to come more into play against major storm events and sea level surges, as mangroves naturally establish themselves along sheltered bays in shallow water where sustainable mud gathers readily.  Here are two of the more obvious examples of this protection in the northern part of Australia:

• In 1974, when Cyclone Tracy decimated Darwin, the only two yachts left undamaged were sheltering in a mangrove creek.
• In 2006, when Cyclone Larry set upon Far North Queensland, the mangroves again protected many vessels and stretches of coastline, and the damage bill would have been considerably higher if it wasn't for the presence of intact mangrove forests.

When not researching the weird or the wonderful, the comical or the cultured, the sinful or the serious, I chase my creative side, the results of which can be seen as selected photographs of my travels on my website at:

http://ken-boddie.squarespace.com

The author of the above, Ken Boddie, besides being a sometime poet and occasional writer, is an enthusiastic photographer, rarely leisure-travelling without his Canon, and loves to interact with other like-minded people with diverse interests.

Ken's three day work week (part time commitment) as a consulting engineer allows him to follow his photography interests, and to plan trips to an ever increasing list of countries and places of scenic beauty and cultural diversity.