SAve Mangroves

Mangrove is a group of tropical and specialized trees growing in the saline and brackish water system. The mangrove trees are highly productive and economical which also protect the shoreline from erosion and cyclonic conditions.

Mangrove is one of the fragile but highly productive ecosystem found along our Indian coast. Indian has approximately 700,000 ha of area covered by mangroves along the estuaries and major deltas.

The term "mangrove" has been applied to plants that live in muddy, wet soil in tropical or subtropical tidal waters. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary describes the word "mangrove" as obscurely connected with the Portuguese word "mangue" and the Spanish word "mangle". In the nineteen sixties the term "mangal" was used for a community of mangrove plants and the term "mangrove" for the plant species making up the forest. The terminology has tended to fall into disuse recently and term such as "mangrove forest", "tidal forest" and "coastal woodland" have begun to appear.

Why mangroves?
The mangroves are angiosperms, with 45 species in India. They have special characters like viviparous germination, prop or knee roots and salt glands. These trees form a thick forest belt on the deltas, along major estuaries, and fringe the estuarine banks, as well as backwaters.

This unique tree resource is used for various purposes like tannin extraction, paper and pulp, firewood, timber, charcoal, fodder and several other by-products. The mangrove swamps are rich in the larvae of many economically important fishes, prawns, crabs and bivalves. These are the most suitable area for feeding, breeding and nursery grounds of these marine organisms and hence important for aquaculture purposes.

The present intention is to sketch the most important features of mangroves and mangrove communities in such a way that the interested user can understand them. Mangroves can be trees, shrubs, palms or ground ferns growing in the zone between high and low tide.

MANGROVE USES:
Ecologists tell us that mangroves provide double protection – the first layer of red mangroves with their flexible branches and tangled roots hanging in the coastal waters absorb the first shock waves. The second layer of tall black mangroves then operates like a wall withstanding much of the sea’s fury. Mangroves in addition absorb more carbon dioxide per unit area than ocean phytoplankton, a critical factor in global warming.

The mangroves have long functioned as a storehouse of materials providing food, Medicines, shelter and tools. The fruit of certain species, including the Nypa palm, can be eaten after preparation along with the nectar of some of the flowers. The best honey is considered to be that produced from mangroves, particularly the river mangrove (Aegiceras corniculatum).

Numerous medicines are derived from mangroves. Skin disorders and sores, including leprosy, may be treated with ashes or bark infusions of certain species. Headaches, rheumatism, snakebites, boils, ulcers, diarrhea, hemorrhages...and many more conditions are traditionally treated with mangrove plants.

The latex from the leaf of the blind-your-eye mangrove (Exoecaria agallocha) can indeed cause blindness, but the powerful chemicals in it can be used on sores and to treat marine stings. They are also used for fishing, when leaves are crushed and dropped in water fish are stupefied and float to the surface. This sap is currently being tested for its medical properties and may play a part in western medicine.

Certain tree species, notably the cedar mangrove and the cannonball mangrove (relatives of the red cedar) as well as the gray mangrove are prized for their hard wood and used for boat building and cabinet timber as well as for tools such as digging sticks, spears and boomerangs. The fronds of the Nypa palm are used for thatching and basket weaving. Various barks are used for tanning, pneumatophores (peg roots) make food fishing floats while the wood from yellow mangroves (Ceriops species) has a reputation for burning even when wet.

These fragile and sensitive trees and their ecosystem have been abused, neglected and overexploited in India. The major threats to mangroves are deforestation, reclamation and lately pollution also.

In addition, mangroves contribute to improved water quality by filtering and assimilating pollutants, stabilizing bottom sediments, and protecting shorelines from erosion in an already strained ecosystem.

Uniqueness of Mangroves:
Mangrove trees offer significant and unique habitat to birds, mammals, and fish populations through a complex marine food chain, creation of breeding habitat, and establishment of restrictive areas that offer protection for maturing offspring.

Mangrove plants produce about one kilo of litter (mainly leaves, twigs, bark, fruit and flowers) per square meter per year. Crabs consume some of this but most must be broken down before the nutrients become available to other animals. That is where the bacteria, along with fungi, come in. Dividing sometimes every few minutes, they feast on the litter, increasing its food value by reducing unusable carbohydrates and increasing the amount of protein - up to four times on a leaf which has been in seawater for a few months. Fish and prawns then eat partly decomposed leaf particles, loaded with colonies of protein-rich microorganisms. They in turn produce waste that, along with the smallest mangrove debris, is munched up by mollusks and small crustaceans. Even dissolved substances are used by plankton or, if they land on the mud surface, are browsed by animals such as crabs and mud whelks.

This process is not confined to the mangroves. While some litter is recycled on the spot, this system is one of the few to export much of the - organic matter it produces. Every time the tide retreats it carries a cargo of food out to sea. Studies of the mangroves at the northern end of Hinchinbrook Island have shown that they export more than 12,500 tonnes of litter per year into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. This material is deposited over an area of 260 square kilometers of seabed. Here bacteria densities are almost as high as those in the mangrove mud and they do much the same job, breaking down the litter to be consumed by bottom-living fauna, by prawns and fish.

An estimated 75 per cent of commercially caught fish and prawns depend directly on mangroves at some time in their lives or feed on food chains leading back there. Since those species making up the remainder of the catch probably also owe much to nutrients exported from the mangroves, these coastal forests can be seen as one of our major assets.

Why mangrove afforestation?
Indian mangrove have been deforested and reclaimed to such an extent that the mangroves along the west coast are very much degraded. This has not only affected the coastline but also the fisheries to a large extent.

Afforestation of mangrove areas on a large scale is the most urgent need of today, if the coastal environment is to be brought back again to its earlier pristine glory. Already vast mangrove areas have been degraded to wastelands as a result of deforestation, reclamation and pollution. It has also adversely affected the coastal fisheries.

The tsunami disaster was more or less the outcome of faulty business and economics. Shrimp cultivation, rising to over 8 billion tonnes a year in the year 2000, had already played havoc with the fragile eco-systems. The World Bank, as the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) once termed it, largely funded the ‘rape-and-run’ industry.

The expansion of shrimp farming was at the cost of tropical mangrove forests -- the world’s most important ecosystems. Each acre of mangrove forest destroyed results in an estimated 676 pounds loss in marine harvest. Mangrove swamps have been nature’s protection for the coastal regions from the large waves, weathering the impact of cyclones, and serving as a nursery for three-fourth of the commercial fish species that spend part of their life cycle in the swamps.

In India, mangrove cover has been reduced to less than a third of its original in the past three decades. Between 1963 and 1977, India destroyed nearly 50 per cent of its mangroves. Local communities were forcibly evicted to make way for the shrimp farms. In Andhra Pradesh, more than 50,000 people were forcibly removed and millions displaced throughout the country to make room for the aquaculture farms. Whatever remained of the mangroves was cut down by the hotel industry, virtually aided and abetted by the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Ministry of Industries.

Five-star hotels, golf courses, and mansions sprung up all along disregarding the concern being expressed by environmentalists. These two ministries worked overtime to dilute the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) norms thereby allowing the hotels to even take over the 500-meter buffer that was supposed to be maintained along the beach.

In the past two decades, the entire coastline along the Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea, and Strait of Malacca in the Indian Ocean and all along the South Pacific Ocean has been a witness to massive investments in tourism and hotels. But Myanmar and Maldives suffered very less from the killing spree of the tsunami because the tourism industry had so far not spread its tentacles to the virgin mangroves and coral reefs surrounding the coastline. The large coral reef surrounding the islands of Maldives absorbed much of the tidal fury thereby restricting the human loss to a little over 100 dead. Coral reef absorbs the sea’s fury by breaking the waves.

The tragedy however is that more than 70 per cent of world’s coral reef has already been destroyed. Mangroves also help to protect offshore coral reefs by filtering out the silt flowing seawards from the land. Tourism growth, whether in the name of eco-tourism or leisure tourism, decimated the mangroves and destroyed the coral reefs.

If only the mangroves were intact, the damage from tsunami would have been greatly minimized. It happened earlier in Bangladesh. In 1960, a tsunami wave hit the coast in an area where mangroves were intact. There was not a single human loss.

In Tamil Nadu, Pichavaram and Muthupet with dense mangroves suffered low human casualties and less economic damage from the Dec.26 tsunami. Earlier, the famed mangroves of Bhiterkanika in Orissa (which also serve as the breeding ground for the olive-ridley turtles) had reduced the impact of the ‘super cyclone’ that had struck in Oct 1999, killing over 10,000 people and rendering millions homeless.

The life cycle of a shrimp farm is a maximum of two to five years. The ponds are then abandoned leaving behind toxic waste, destroyed ecosystems and displaced communities, annihilating livelihoods. The farms come up at the cost of natural ecosystems including mangroves. The whole cycle is then repeated in another pristine coastal area. The WWF and other environmental organisations have quoted one estimate -- economic losses due to the shrimp farms are approximately five times the potential earnings.

Tourism is no better. Kerala in south India, marketed as “God’s own country”, destroyed the mangroves in a desperate bid to lure the tourists. It is only after tsunami struck that the state government was quick to announce an Rs 340-million project aimed at insulating the Kerala coastline against tidal surges.

Please pass these messages and create an awareness on protecting the mangroves that protects us naturally.

Let us save the Mother Earth