Josh Clark

The above-water part of the mangal basically does the same thing, but for terrestrial and arboreal animals like monkeys, insects, reptiles, birds, they make their home in their nurseries in the mangals too, the branches, the leaves, the trunks.

Those are really just as important for above-ground animals as they are for below-water animals.

Yes, and also, attention Kristen Bell, if you are ambivalent about mangrove forests, prepare to care because in Panama, the pygmy three-toed sloth, critically endangered by the way, only makes its home in mangrove forests down there.

That's right.

So you got to care now.

Yeah, and I remember how heartened we were when we realized that she didn't touch it, even though she clearly wanted to more than she's ever wanted to do anything in her life, but she didn't do it, you know?

So good for her.

That's pretty great.

Yeah, mangrove superpower number one, which is coastline protection, which is pretty important if you live along the coast.

It is now.

I think it's a great word.

Yeah, because there's so many different like roots and individual things to bump into on the way to the shore that it's going to reduce its energy, which means that it reduces one of the pernicious effects that waves have on shore, which is erosion.

And not only does it reduce erosion because the waves don't have enough energy to take stuff back out to sea, it actually has them deposit the sediments that they're bringing to the shore in the mangrove swamps.

And if you combine that, I should say, with the really low oxygen environments that make up the mucky bottom in a mangrove mangrove,

I guess you can kind of flashback to our coal, the mystery of coal episode where we talked a lot about how swamps work like that.

So mangrove swamps are very much like that as well.

But then in addition to that, they have ocean sediments being brought, all this organic stuff being brought from the oceans layering with the mucky sediment from the mangroves falling into the muck.

which means that they're like holding on to a lot of stuff and building up soil, as a matter of fact, so much so that it outpaces sea level rises in some areas.

A hundredth of a meter.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.