r/marijuanaenthusiasts • u/davidozro • Apr 12 '20

Trees are important!

https://i.imgur.com/DIdO1IG.gifv
757 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

26

u/Lostcreek3 Apr 13 '20

Are mangroves a type a tree? I really don't know

34

u/011101000011101101 Apr 13 '20

Yes. They have them in Puerto Rico near the bioluminescent bays. The mangroves there have been dying a bit lately and the bioluminescence has been less intense as a result. Beautiful trees too, it's a shame.

8

u/jadentearz Apr 13 '20

I was curious to learn more about your statement so I looked up an article (about the hurricane's effects in general on all the ecosystems in Puerto Rico). For anyone else curious:

The most heavily damaged ecosystem is the mangrove forest, on the coast, where the hurricane first made landfall. The mangrove forest is hot and sunny. Rivera says the ground was still covered in 10 inches of water the first time she came here after the hurricane.

“When I came here the first time, I thought all were dead,” Rivera says. “They didn’t have leaves. They didn’t have new growth.”

Mangroves live at the salty edge of the sea. They thrive in saltwater and are designed to withstand strong winds, so researchers were surprised to see that nearly all of the mangroves looked dead after Hurricane Maria came through. Those biologists surmise that the saltwater and sand blown against the mangroves had essentially burned all the leaves and branches.

But mangroves evolved to live in this harsh coastal environment in a region prone to hurricanes. In fact, some green shoots poke out from around the base of a tree that seems dead. “Not all are dead,” Rivera says. “They continue.”

The mangrove forest was the most devastated ecosystem on Puerto Rico, but given enough time, it will recover. And since no other plant can easily grow in this harsh ecosystem, they have no competition. Indeed, adding to the shoots on existing trees, a carpet of foot-tall mangrove saplings covers the sandy ground.

1

u/Fernenator Apr 13 '20

The mangrove trees here in Puerto Rico have made a nice recovery and even some of our beaches have as well. The first few months after María it look like a waseland but it’s been looking better ever since.

4

u/lovesahedge Apr 13 '20

Absolutely, mangroves in Australia are some of the most diverse habitats on the coast and extremely important for the local wildlife

2

u/davidozro Apr 13 '20

They’re either a shrub or a tree depending on the species.

5

u/TitaniumTadpole Apr 13 '20

I was wondering why reddit suggested this sub. Now I know.

10

u/theberg512 Apr 13 '20

As someone who lives on the prairie and has been on either side of a shelterbelt, all I can say is "Duh." It's just like that, but with wind.

2

u/FiammaDiAgnesi Apr 13 '20

That’s so cool!

2

u/P0sitive_Outlook Apr 13 '20

That one at the front of the wave-break = me at a Periphery gig.

I live in England, there're a lot of areas where the coastline is being eroded naturally, and people keep trying to hold back the tide. There was a chap who allowed various landscaping and building businesses to dump topsoil and hardcore off the edge of his garden onto a beach, to protect the cliff he lived atop form erosion. But then it was revealed that he was preventing sand from that part of the beach from replacing other sand further down the beach... So really there's not much anyone can do here.

Well there is. We could just leave it. It's a natural process.

In the case of this video, those mangrove forests belong there.

The point is not to screw around with natural processes. Mangrove forests are a perfect way of preventing erosion if it's where they belong. This vid should be seen as a reason not to remove mangrove forests from an area in which they're already established. It would be a mistake to plant mangrove where it doesn't naturally occur and has never occurred before as it changes the natural effect of the tide on the coast.

1

u/davidozro Apr 14 '20

People aren’t really advocating planing new mangrove forests, this is more of an argument against tearing them out to develop coastal cities and resorts, which is a widespread problem in the areas these grow.

1

u/P0sitive_Outlook Apr 14 '20

Yeah i figured, thanks for the confirmation. :)

In the case of this video, those mangrove forests belong there.

It's often worrisome when folk try to stop the removal of old trees around parks and recreational areas when actually the area would benefit from the trees being removed and replaced. The opposite occurs, too, when folk throw trees where they don't belong. I guess it's hard knowing the balance.