Mangrove Lifecycle

It's another gorgeous afternoon in the Lower Keys, God is in his Heaven and all is well with the world, when you look down and see something you have never seen before. No, not the nurse shark nosing its way past your feet in the shallows, but a little bundle of nosey energy that most closely resembles an automatic vacuum cleaner as advertised on TV. It is in fact a dinosaur closely related to the scorpion:I have seen lots of dead horseshoe crab shells but never a live one. In the spring of 1989 I was sailing single handed the coast of Mississippi and I spent a night anchored off one of the Gulf Islands, a pine tree covered sandy hump rising out of the shallow waters. I rowed ashore and walked my kingdom all by myself. I felt as though I had landed in an alien world as the shoreline was covered by these bizarre oval soup bowls. To the eyes of a Pacific Coast sailor they were other worldly. And now finally I've seen a live horseshoe crab scuttling around on its important business: Half covered in sea grass as it turned out, looking like an old loofah, and somewhat undignified. The crab was cruising the edge of what is known as a fish nursery, a place where fish can lay their eggs under cover as it were, in the red roots of mangrove bushes which sprout out of the salt water, right next to my Bonneville.Mangroves are the place where fish sometimes come to spawn which is why some people think of them as fish nurseries:

The mangrove roots provide shade and protection from predators and they harbor nutrients as well for young growing fish. The mangroves propagate by growing propagules, long green cigars, hidden among the leaves:Some people think mangroves actually drink salt water but what they do is they extract the salt from the water, send the salt to certain selected leaves that become yellow and fall off the bush, while the rest of the mangrove uses the fresh water thus obtained. This is adaptation we are told by those with a scientific bent. Some propagules have the bad luck to fall on stony soil as it were and they will burn up and go a dark brown color as their potential is burned up by the southern sun:Unless a passer by picks them up and throws them in the nearest saltwater, where when they are mature they will adopt a nose down position and start to push roots into the dirt:Eventually they sprout and grow and assuming they aren't cut down or trampled or uprooted by a storm they appear above the water, singly at first:And then they propagate and gradually fill in the area and form little islands, which become bigger islands that attract more floating propagules and off you go:Mangroves are protected ever since scientists figured they have a critical role in the fish food chain. Plus they make excellent hurricane buffers and they have their own aesthetic appeal as well. All purpose tropical plants for which we are truly grateful. Not majestic, not over powering, just there, alongside the highway doing God's work in their own modest way.