Josh Clark

But for the most part, they're just really good at keeping salt from being taken up by their roots.

I just find that fascinating.

Yeah.

Which is pretty fun.

They're both apt.

Yeah, so the pneumatophores that black mangroves have, those stalagmites that are coming up in spikes around them, those act as snorkels.

So they stick up out of the water, and they're covered in these little cells called lenicels, and that's where oxygen exchange happens.

So they actually absorb oxygen through these snorkels.

They get taken into the snorkel underground into the other roots of the tree,

and used for aerobic respiration, which is converting food into energy, which is pretty nuts.

Makes sense.

Yeah, some of those pneumatophores can reach up to 10 feet tall.

Did you see that?

Yeah, I didn't see it either.

Could be made up.

Yeah, so that explains also why there's so many roots and so many pneumatophores that spread around these trees.

It's like if you dug up a tree of roughly the same size, it would probably have a similar sized root structure, maybe a little less, but you don't see it.

It's all underground.

This is above ground, so it looks like a lot of roots, and it is a lot of roots, but it's not necessarily more than a terrestrial tree would have.

We just don't see them.