Josh Clark

I mean, that's a yes.

They're making lemonade out of the lemons that they were handed by natural selection for where they grow.

So you would think like they just, they can drink salt water and use it like, you know, terrestrial trees use water.

Not true.

There's actually two techniques where they can either keep salt from entering their roots or they can take the salt in and then get rid of it in certain ways.

And so that means that there's two types, secretors and non-secretors.

And black mangroves are secretors, I believe, right?

It tastes like salt and DDT.

Red mangroves, they're non-secretors.

So they actually just don't allow salt to be taken up by their roots.

Now that's easier said than done because their roots are planted in the water, right?

So there's water, they're taking up water from the ocean, from salt water.

And what they do is they have cell walls that actually act through reverse osmosis.

It lets water through, but it doesn't let solids through.

which is quite a trick.

I mean, that's something that humans have only recently figured out how to do.

Mangroves have been doing it for who knows how many hundreds of thousands or millions of years.

But they do it in part because they have this hydrophobic lipophilic material called suberin that really serves them well.

Yeah, I saw 90% to 95%, but yeah, that's still a lot of salt for a plant.

Yeah, so they have at least adapted in some ways to tolerate salt more than other plants.