Category Archives: Mangrove News
New Record of Mangrove Crab From Singapore
Hoo-ray! NUS Honours Student in Life Sciences, Lee Bee Yan and Director of Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, Prof. Peter Ng have identified a new record of a pilumnid (hairy crab) mangrove crab (Heteropilumnus sasekumari) found in the mangroves of Singapore! Another concrete reason to conserve mangroves of Singapore-there maybe more new species of mangrove animals and plants!
Read more about this discovery in Nature of Singapore
A Peek into the Mangroves of Sri Lanka (Part I: Chilaw Mangroves)
| ආයුඛෝවන් (Ayubowan) |
Ayubowan! (Greetings in Sinhala, equivalent of saying “May you live a long life”).
Last December 2011, Rick a.k.a. the Mangrove Apprentice island-hopped from Singapore to Sri Lanka, which is 2601 kilometers away from the little-red-dot for a holiday. However, he couldn’t stray far away from mangroves upon touchdown in The Resplendent Land. He visited two mangrove sites which were physically and biologically different from each other and also to that of Singapore mangroves.
For this post (Part I), we shall highlight the first site that his journey at a degraded mangrove and restoration site.
It is located at the outskirts of Chilaw, within the Puttalam-Chilaw lagoons , Northwest of Sri Lanka.
Chilaw, like many parts of Sri Lanka, is rich in biodiversity. Besides the mangroves, Chilaw-Puttalam lagoons are also famous for blue whale and dolphin watching, which are all-year round and resident animals in these lagoons.
Upon reaching the mangrove, Rick realized the mangrove vegetation in this site was very different than that of Mandai. Mangrove trees there were generally stunted in height and shrub-like. This observation may match the description of a degraded mangrove site; generally poor-nutrient soil (hence the stunted growth), the patchiness of mangrove species and poor diversity of mangrove species.
Riverine mangrove shrubs at Chilaw
A buta-buta or milky mangrove (Excoecaria agallocha) is easily spotted with its grey bark, uusally, mutliple trunked and its convulated roots. Its distinguishing feature is that tree barks or damaged leaves releases white sap that may cause temporary blindness, hence the plant is named as buta-buta (blind)
Multiple trunked Buta-buta (Excoecaria agallocha) sighted
The roots of the Buta-buta in this mangrove was extremely convulated
Pointed leaves & small, round and clustered fruits-these secondary features of identifying a Buta-buta
A child posing for the camera in front of the Buta-buta
The second tree species found along the site was a Bakau (Rhizophora tree). Kindly click here to know more Bakau trees.
Ah-ha, Rhizophora tree spotted!
Perhaps it is a Rhizophora apiculata
Most probably a Rhizophora apiculata. Look at the buds
Venturing further away along the river, Rick spotted a shrimp pond still in operation. Shrimp ponds are an eye-sore to mangrove conservationists because mangroves are usually cleared out by shrimp farmers for short-term shrimp farming and they are usually abandoned after that. Kindly click here to read up more about the impacts of shrimp farming.
A shrimp pond adjacent to the river
A shrimp pond farmer showing his catch for the day
Shrimps caught in a tray net submerged in the pond
Given that an operational shrimp pond is located only meters away from another mangrove site, is there any hope for this mangroves of Chilaw? Yes, UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) is carrying several mangrove restoration in this site(pictured below). However, there is a need to better law enforcement and better governance in order protect mangrove areas from destruction in the first place. Education pertaining to the importance of mangroves would play a vital role to conserve mangroves for its many benefits.
Mangrove restoration by UNDP ongoing at the site
Next post will be Part II of Rick’s mangrove journey at Maduganga river! Be sure to catch the next post and other exciting news posts from this blog! Thank you!
First action plan for world’s blue carbon policy
“The first policy framework outlining activities needed to include coastal marine areas such as mangroves, tidal marshes and seagrasses into the work of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), has been presented in a report by IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) and Conservation International (CI).”
If you have read previous blog on “Mangrove as carbon sink“, you will understand how important mangrove as a carbon sink! (yeah, it rhymes..)
With this knowledge, how can we left mangrove out of the blue carbon policy? Scientists are including all the coastal marine ecosystem into the first action plan of blue carbon!
This mean that people are taking the importance of mangroves more seriously and a political framework like this will certainly helps!
More on the news of “First action plan for world’s blue carbon policy“
Seafood vs. Mangroves
An interesting article from The Independent (UK) on 24th October 2011 highlights the lost of mangroves in tropical island of Muisne, off Ecuador’s northern coast to due to shrimp farming. Singapore had its fair share of such losses of mangroves due to their establishments. Kindly read Ria Tan’s fact sheet on shrimp ponds in Singapore.
Highlights of the article:
“Feeding the developed world’s seemingly insatiable demand for cheap seafood, shrimp farms have ravaged Muisne’s delicate mangrove ecosystem…”
“In the 1970s, before shrimp farms arrived, the island had 20,000 hectares of mangroves. Now there are just over 5,000 hectares”
“From Indonesia to Brazil, the story is the same. Yet nowhere has the growth of farms for shrimp, prawns, salmon and other species been as explosive as in Latin America and the Caribbean. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, production in the region grew annually at 21.1 per cent between 1970 and 2008. Over the same period, annual global consumption of farm-reared seafood has risen from 700g to 7.8kg per capita. “
The articles also reiterates the bad impacts of shrimp farms not only to mangroves but to other ecosystems
“The shrimp farms typically have a complex series of environmental impacts. Initially, sections of the mangrove are cleared to make way for the farms. Once operational, the farms may use large quantities of antibiotics and pesticides that often contaminate the surrounding forests. Farms can also obstruct the flow of rivers and streams, preventing them from mixing with seawater to provide the brackish water that mangroves need to thrive. In doing so, they provide a double whammy by stopping the farms’ pollutants from being washed away, increasing the ecological devastation while the shrimp and prawns are reared in a cocktail of chemicals, stale water and bacteria.”
To read more, kindly visit the webpage below:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/how-the-hunt-for-seafood-is-ravaging-a-tropical-island-2375084.html
