The WFSU Ecology Blog
  • Home
    • About
    • EcoAdventures
      • Kayak and Canoe Adventures
      • Hiking
      • Wildlife Watching
    • Observations From the Field
      • White Pelicans Visit Dr. Charles L. Evans Pond in Tallahassee
      • An April Walk at Ochlockonee River WMA
      • Nesting Raptors at Honeymoon Island State Park
    • WFSU Public Media Home
  • Documentaries
    • In Their Words: Black Legacy Communities in North Florida
    • EcoCitizen Show | Seasons in South Tallahassee
    • Red Wolf Family Celebrates First Year at the Tallahassee Museum
    • Roaming the Red Hills
    • Oyster Doctors
    • Testing the Ecology of Fear
    • EcoShakespeare
    • Stories from the Apalachicola
    • Classic WFSU Ecology Documentaries
  • Habitats
    • Estuaries
      • Oyster Reef
        • The Effects of Predators and Fear on Oyster Reefs
        • Apalachicola Oyster Research
        • Animal Species in a North Florida Intertidal Oyster Reef
        • Oyster Reef Ecology | On the Reef
      • Salt Marsh
        • In the Grass- Salt Marsh Biodiversity Study
        • Plants and Animals of a North Florida Salt Marsh
        • Salt Marsh Ecology | In the Grass
      • Seagrass Bed
        • Predatory Snails, and Prey, of the Bay Mouth Bar Seagrass Beds
      • In the Grass, On the Reef Glossary
    • Waterways Big and Small
      • Aucilla/ Wacissa Watershed
      • Apalachicola Basin
        • Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines | Virtual Field Trip
        • The Age of Nature Screening & Discussion | The Future of the Apalachicola
        • Apalachicola River and Bay
        • Apalachicola RiverTrek | Kayaking, Camping, & Hiking the River Basin
    • Longleaf Pine & Fire Ecology
  • Backyard Habitat
    • Backyard Blog
      • My Year in Bugs: the 2022 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Ecology Blog | 2021
      • Backyard Blog November/ December 2020
      • Backyard Blog September/ October 2020
      • July and August 2020 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Blog June 2020
      • Backyard Blog May 2020
      • Backyard Blog April 2020
      • Backyard Blog February and March 2020
      • Backyard Blog January 2020
      • Backyard Blog October through December 2019
      • Backyard Blog September 2019
      • Backyard Blog August 2019
      • Backyard Blog July 2019
      • Backyard Blog June 2019
      • Backyard Blog May 2019
      • Backyard Blog April 2019
      • Backyard Blog March 2019
      • Backyard Blog February 2019
      • Backyard Blog January 2019
      • The Backyard Bug Blog 2018
    • Backyard Flora and Fauna
      • Bees of North Florida and South Georgia
      • The Seasonality of Bees (and Bee Plants) in North Florida
      • Woody Vines of North Florida
      • Flies of North Florida are More Diverse than You’d Think
      • The Case for Weeds, Our Unsung Florida Native Plants
      • Devil’s Walkingstick: Your New Favorite Thorny Pollinator Plant?
      • Florida Native Milkweed | Tips for Growing Your Monarch Friendly Garden
      • Mistletoe | A Parasite for the Holidays (But Maybe We Like it Anyway?)
    • Florida Friendly Seasonal Planting Guide
    • Pollinator and Gardening Posts
    • Gardening Web Resources
Kayak and Canoe Adventures
RiverTrek 2021: Five Days on the Apalachicola River
Lower Lake Lafayette: Kayak Tallahassee’s Hidden Swamp
Chipola River Paddling Trail | The Ovens and...
Kayaking Bald Point | Adventure on a Living...
Wacissa Springs Adventure | Kayaking a Wild Florida...
A Geologist’s View of the Apalachicola River |...
Upper Chipola River Kayak Adventure | Ghosts &...
Tate’s Hell & the Apalachicola River Delta |...
Kayak Scouting Mission on the Ochlockonee Water Trail
Merritt’s Mill Pond | Kayaking and Spring Caves

The WFSU Ecology Blog

  • Home
    • About
    • EcoAdventures
      • Kayak and Canoe Adventures
      • Hiking
      • Wildlife Watching
    • Observations From the Field
      • White Pelicans Visit Dr. Charles L. Evans Pond in Tallahassee
      • An April Walk at Ochlockonee River WMA
      • Nesting Raptors at Honeymoon Island State Park
    • WFSU Public Media Home
  • Documentaries
    • In Their Words: Black Legacy Communities in North Florida
    • EcoCitizen Show | Seasons in South Tallahassee
    • Red Wolf Family Celebrates First Year at the Tallahassee Museum
    • Roaming the Red Hills
    • Oyster Doctors
    • Testing the Ecology of Fear
    • EcoShakespeare
    • Stories from the Apalachicola
    • Classic WFSU Ecology Documentaries
  • Habitats
    • Estuaries
      • Oyster Reef
        • The Effects of Predators and Fear on Oyster Reefs
        • Apalachicola Oyster Research
        • Animal Species in a North Florida Intertidal Oyster Reef
        • Oyster Reef Ecology | On the Reef
      • Salt Marsh
        • In the Grass- Salt Marsh Biodiversity Study
        • Plants and Animals of a North Florida Salt Marsh
        • Salt Marsh Ecology | In the Grass
      • Seagrass Bed
        • Predatory Snails, and Prey, of the Bay Mouth Bar Seagrass Beds
      • In the Grass, On the Reef Glossary
    • Waterways Big and Small
      • Aucilla/ Wacissa Watershed
      • Apalachicola Basin
        • Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines | Virtual Field Trip
        • The Age of Nature Screening & Discussion | The Future of the Apalachicola
        • Apalachicola River and Bay
        • Apalachicola RiverTrek | Kayaking, Camping, & Hiking the River Basin
    • Longleaf Pine & Fire Ecology
  • Backyard Habitat
    • Backyard Blog
      • My Year in Bugs: the 2022 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Ecology Blog | 2021
      • Backyard Blog November/ December 2020
      • Backyard Blog September/ October 2020
      • July and August 2020 Backyard Blog
      • Backyard Blog June 2020
      • Backyard Blog May 2020
      • Backyard Blog April 2020
      • Backyard Blog February and March 2020
      • Backyard Blog January 2020
      • Backyard Blog October through December 2019
      • Backyard Blog September 2019
      • Backyard Blog August 2019
      • Backyard Blog July 2019
      • Backyard Blog June 2019
      • Backyard Blog May 2019
      • Backyard Blog April 2019
      • Backyard Blog March 2019
      • Backyard Blog February 2019
      • Backyard Blog January 2019
      • The Backyard Bug Blog 2018
    • Backyard Flora and Fauna
      • Bees of North Florida and South Georgia
      • The Seasonality of Bees (and Bee Plants) in North Florida
      • Woody Vines of North Florida
      • Flies of North Florida are More Diverse than You’d Think
      • The Case for Weeds, Our Unsung Florida Native Plants
      • Devil’s Walkingstick: Your New Favorite Thorny Pollinator Plant?
      • Florida Native Milkweed | Tips for Growing Your Monarch Friendly Garden
      • Mistletoe | A Parasite for the Holidays (But Maybe We Like it Anyway?)
    • Florida Friendly Seasonal Planting Guide
    • Pollinator and Gardening Posts
    • Gardening Web Resources
Plants- From Wildflowers to Longleaf PineSalt Marsh Ecology | In the Grass

Black Mangroves: Strangers in a St. Joe Bay Marsh

by Randall August 8, 2013
by Randall August 8, 2013 0 comment
Click to subscribe to the WFSU Ecology Blog

2-Minute Video: Mangroves don’t love the cold, but relatively mild winters have seen them multiply north of their range.  Randall takes a closer look at black mangroves in  the salt marshes of Saint Joseph Bay.

Dr. Randall Hughes FSU Coastal & Marine Lab/ Northeastern University

IGOR chip- biodiversity 150

A few years ago, I took my colleague Dr. Ed Proffitt to check out the marshes in St. Joseph Bay. He asked to see mangroves, and I thought he was crazy. Mangroves up here? No way! But we had only been in one Buffer Preserve salt marsh together for a few minutes before I realized that the small “shrubs” that I had previously ignored were actually small black mangroves! And the more we looked, the more we found. They aren’t everywhere, but they can be quite abundant in some places.

Shrubby black mangroves (Avicennia germinans) are an increasingly common site in the Saint Joseph Bay State Buffer Preserve.

Shrubby black mangroves (Avicennia germinans) appear to be an increasingly common site in the marshes of the Saint Joseph Bay State Buffer Preserve.

Mangroves typically occur below the “frost line”, or in areas that don’t experience hard freezes. Lore has it that mangroves have become more common in the northern Gulf of Mexico in recent years due to a series of mild winters. I haven’t been monitoring them long enough to say whether or not there are more now than there were, say, 10 or even 20 years ago, but it’s not hard to see that the ones that are here are successfully reproducing, with small seedlings surrounding the adult trees.

There are even red mangroves lingering around – they are less cold-tolerant than the black mangroves and a surprise to find in our marshes!

Dr. Randall Hughes inspects a black mangrove growing in the Saint Joseph Bay State Buffer Preserve.I definitely have not seen any significant dieback in the last 5 winters, even when we have had hard freezes. And I would not be surprised if they become more common and abundant as the climate continues to change.

Mangroves in the marsh raise a number of interesting questions. Will they take over? What will that mean for the services these areas provide to people? Will the fishes and crabs that we like to eat become more or less abundant if mangroves dominate over marsh grasses?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer to these questions. But I can say that the mangroves that occur in St. Joseph Bay aren’t necessarily “better” at surviving in the northern Gulf than mangroves from farther down south. And why should they be?  Well, if a group of mangrove propagules arrived in St. Joe Bay, we may expect that only a subset of them would be able to survive the colder temperatures, and when these propagules grew into adult trees and produced propagules of their own, they should pass that “benefit” to their offspring (the process known as natural selection).

Black mangrove propagules.

Black mangrove propagules.

How do we we test whether St. Joe Bay mangroves are better equipped to live here than mangroves from down south? We have 2 ongoing experiments where we’ve planted “propagules” (young mangroves that look a lot like seeds) from different locations throughout FL in St. Joe Bay and followed them through time to see which ones survive and grow the best. There’s a lot of variation, but the St. Joe Bay propagules (which were largely the “runts” of the bunch to begin with) did not do as well as propagules from some of the areas down south such as Cedar Key and Cape Canaveral. These results suggest that it doesn’t take a particularly special propagule to survive in the northern Gulf; instead, there probably aren’t just many propagules that make it up here to begin with.

Of course, we’ve only been monitoring these propagules for 1-2 years; maybe the St. Joe propagules have an advantage when they get old / big enough to reproduce. We don’t want to speed up the mangrove take-over, so we’ll remove the seedlings in our experiment before that happens. But we’ll definitely continue to monitor the ones that already made it here on their own accord to see what they do next!

The Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve (NERR) south of Saint Augustine is where Randall and David have done a lot of their oyster research.  There, mangroves mingle with marsh cordgrass. Could salt marshes in St. Joseph Bay (or north Florida in general) one day look like something approximating this?

Music in the video by pitx.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number 1161194.  Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Click to subscribe to the WFSU Ecology Blog
Facebook Comments
biodiversityblack mangroveclimate changeforgotten coastpropagulesalt marshSt. Joseph Bay
0 comment
0
FacebookTwitterRedditEmail
Randall

Dr. Randall Hughes is an ecologist and marine biologist focusing on the causes and consequences of species and genetic diversity in coastal systems. She has conducted experimental work on plants and animals in seagrasses, salt marshes, oyster reefs, and kelp forests. The common thread throughout these activities is a long-standing interest in generating information that can enhance the effectiveness of conservation and management decisions.

previous post
Diversity- Getting by With a Little Help From (Salt) Marsh Friends
next post
Apalachicola Oyster Research: SHARK WEEK

Related Posts

One month of production

June 6, 2010

Volunteers’ Labor of Love: The Wolf Creek Trout...

March 5, 2015

Making a Wildlife Pond in Your North Florida...

April 9, 2020

The “In the Grass” Top 10 of 2010

January 7, 2011

The search for patterns

October 19, 2010

Marsh of the future?

September 7, 2011

How Can We Prevent Salt Marsh Die-Off?

June 26, 2013

Video from the SciGirls Day at the FSUCML

July 22, 2011

FAMU BioBlitz: Mapping Invasive Species with iNaturalist

April 10, 2019

Devil’s Walkingstick: Your New Favorite Thorny Pollinator Plant?

July 23, 2021

Search

Subscribe

Subscribe to receive more outdoor adventures, and an in depth look at our local forests and waterways by Email.

If you do not receive a verification e-mail, check your spam folder.

Category

WFSU-FM Environmental Stories

  • Tallahassee’s latest urban reforestation effort brings new trees to Governor’s Park
  • Hurricane Ian’s estimated damage to Florida agriculture tops $1B
  • America’s largest underground springs gets even bigger with the discovery of another cave connection
  • DeSantis outlines second-term environmental plans
  • Deep freeze breaks pipes, creates water crisis across South

Twitter

Tweets by wfsuIGOR

iNaturalist

iNaturalist became a part of the WFSU Ecology Blog during the EcoCitizen Project in 2019.  Since then, we’ve used it to help identify the many plants and animals we see on our shoots.  And on the Backyard Blog, we show how it can be used to identify weeds and garden insects, to help figure out what’s beneficial or a possible pest.  Below is the iNaturalist profile belonging to WFSU Ecology producer Rob Diaz de Villegas.

iNaturalist


View robdv’s observations »

Most Recent

  • The Wakulla Springs Wildlife Survey- a decades long look
  • Welcome Liesel Hamilton to the WFSU Ecology Blog!
  • My Year in Bugs: the 2022 Backyard Blog
  • Timberlane Ravine: learn to love dead trees (and trillium!)
  • The strange and dangerous love lives of zebra longwing butterflies

Archives

August 2013
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031  
« Jul   Sep »

WFSU Ecology YouTube

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • Flickr
  • Youtube

@2017 - PenciDesign. All Right Reserved. Designed and Developed by PenciDesign