Ed Proffitt, a professor of marine ecology at Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, left, and Max Portmann, a PhD student with the Proffitt-Delvin Lab of Coastal Ecology and Genetics, look at a young black mangrove near Oso Bay in Corpus Christi on April 18, 2024.PORT ARANSAS — Dead mangroves cover Harbor Island near this coastal city, creating a bleak landscape that contrasts with the calm, blue water that laps at the shore.
The way mangroves are re-making the Texas coastline is one more example of how human-caused climate change is already altering our environment. Like other animals and plants, mangroves can now live farther north because temperatures are warming. Why mangroves can be bad: They displace the marsh habitat that acts as a nursery for some fish and shrimp and where endangered whooping cranes spend winters. And when mangroves die during a freeze, they form a skeleton forest, as one scientist described it, leaving the shoreline vulnerable to the erosion they once helped prevent.
Victoria Congdon, a marine scientist with Mission-Aransas National Estuarine Research Reserve, navigates a boat through the entrance to the Lighthouse Lakes area off Port Aransas.Fierro-Cabo said it’s possible that the Texas coast may begin to look more like Mexico’s mangrove-covered shore as temperatures continue to warm., the state’s average temperature was the hottest ever recorded: 68.1 degrees.
Before the 2021 freeze, the researchers documented how plentiful and big the shrubs grew; some rose higher than graduate student Max Portmann, who is 6’7”. After the freeze, they thought many of the mangroves they studied were dead. But some sprouted up again from their old roots, reaching skyward. The scientists estimated about 40% of those they studied on campus survived.
Max Portmann, a PhD student with the Proffitt-Delvin Lab of Coastal Ecology and Genetics, hikes through a black mangrove thicket near Oso Bay in Corpus Christi. Under the right conditions, mangroves can grow into tall trees.Portmann squelched in scuba boots across the marsh muck to get closer to the plants, squatted down and sorted through the tangle of green to show how the mangroves’ roots spread more than three feet from the plant’s trunk.
A whooping crane hunts in a salt marsh where a few mangrove trees dot the shoreline. Mangroves crowd out native plants, including Carolina wolfberry, a food source for the endangered cranes.One species in particular that advocates worry about when it comes to mangroves is whooping cranes, which have been a success story after being pushed to the brink of extinction.
پاکستان تازہ ترین خبریں, پاکستان عنوانات
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