Hi, everyone. I hope you're enjoying your Saturday morning and your weekend so far, and I hope this episode makes it a little bit better because it's about one of my favorite trees, the mangrove. I discovered mangroves in person when I went to Coastal Mexico for the first time, and I'll tell you what, I fell in love with these things. They are amazing. Mangroves colon Nature's best tree, I think.
So welcome to Stuff you should know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and there's Jerry over there. So let's get to it. While we're talking about mangroves. Everybody mangroves gather around while we talk about mangrove.
My new favorite tree.
It's a great tree. It's a good favorite tree to.
Have, it is, and this is one of those. I think this is the second and probably final that was inspired by my recent trip to Mexico because we were surrounded by mangroves, literally surrounded by mangroves, and we couldn't get enough of them, and like riding the bikes round and looking in these mangrove forests and considering what it must be like to try and navigate through them, nearly impossible, I would say, because yeah, I mean you've seen them
in person. I'm sure like just how dense these things are. And you know we're gonna be talking about different kinds, but really sort of the money mangroves sure are the ones that we're going to focus on, and they are just I was knocked out just by how they looked, and I could tell that they were a remarkable wonder of nature and evolution. And then after this stuff Dave Rus helped us put this together, after learning everything that they're capable of, it's just like, what kind of tree
is this? It's amazing.
It's an amazing tree. Like I said, it's maybe one of the best trees to have as your favorite tree, because there are very few trees that are this amazing, Chuck Man, and we're talking mangroves, and we should say mangroves aren't necessarily like a species or even a family of tree. One of the other things that makes them such a cool tree to have as a favorite is that there's something like eighty or ninety species of them,
and they're not genetically related in every case. Instead, biologists classify them by their ability to survive and even thrive in salty water, that in soil that has little to no oxygen, which are two things that most trees can't do. And that's just the tip of the iceberg in what makes mangroves so amazing.
Yeah, but like I said, we're talking mainly about those amazing trees that sit up above the water with this network of you know, look like fingers just sort of propping up the tree, which are the roots. They are a woodland tree, also could be called a shrub, and they grow in a pretty narrow area between well they're subtropical along the coastlines first of all, but they grow between literally between the terrestrial and the marine environment in salty brackish water.
Yeah, and there's I want to say a lot of them. It's really not though. I think they make up like one percent of the forests of the world mangrove forests are. But it's still eighty five thousand square miles, which is a pretty decent amount of area for you know, one kind of tree. It's about the size of the state of Arkansas, and the largest mangrove forest in the world is at the mouth of the Ganges near the Bay
of Bengal. It's called the Sundarbans and that's where the Bengal tiger lives, which is pretty cool.
Agreed. They exist in one hundred and eighteen countries and here in the United States, in Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. And I thought, oh, surely the Georgia coast so close to Florida, surely they've got some mangroves.
Don't even try.
Not quite that. I did see some people that were like, oh, it's so mangroves, but it's not true. It looks like the closest mangroves are about forty miles from the Georgia border, near the Georgia coast line. So it was really sad that we don't have our mangroves. But they do have them in Florida and Louisiana and Texas, in Mexico, that's right.
And again you said that they grow subtropically, and Chuck, I want to share that it was just today that I finally stopped and was like, this subtropical thing is driving me crazy, Like it's above the tropics on either side. It's either above or below, depending on where your perspective, but it's not below. It's not below the equator. And then I realized, if you're on the equator from the perspective of the equator, it's below the equator on either side, so it's sub tropical.
You've never stood on the equator.
I never have, and I think I can be a blame. I've never been to Ecuador.
Well, we should go sometime. We should do a podcast live live from the equator.
Yeah, and see if we melt.
I know I will. I'm melting this week. As far as man the money mangroves that I was talking about, we're talking about red, black and white, and for my money, I love those red mangroves. Those are the ones that grow along the water's edge. They have those proper roots that and if you've never seen a ma mangrove, please just look up red mangrove. And they're called prop roots
because they prop that tree up off the ground. They are fully well, not fully exposed because they also go into the water, into the soil, but they are largely exposed and they are just tangled, gnarly beautiful roots that again, I can't imagine trying to navigate through a mangrove forest. You probably had to go around.
Yeah, it can be really really thick, both above water and below water because of those roots. So those roots, if you see them, that means that it's low tide. At high tide, they're usually covered up with water. But it's like you said, they prop the tree up, and so for that reason, because at low tide you can see the bottom of the tree and it's above ground.
They're sometimes called walking trees, but they're pretty neat. And the red mangrove is I think anyone who knows about mangroves or seen a mangrove probably is what they're thinking of as a red mangrove because they're just those those roots are just so characteristic and unusual, you know.
Yeah, the black mangroves are still really cool looking because they have these protrusions coming up out of the water called neumataphores and just you know, put a pin in this they but they allow the plant to basically breathe. And we'll talk about that later. But if you look at a picture of these, it looks sort of like almost like little just spiky roots sticking up out of the ground all around the tree.
Yeah, almost like stalagmites. Yeah, and I got that right too, by the way, right, white mangroves are. It's weird. I don't understand fully why they're considered mangroves aside from the fact that they must still thrive and brackish or salty water and poor poor oxygen soil, that's it. But I guess so. But they grow inland and they have normal shallow root systems like any other terrestrial tree, but they're still considered mangroves.
Yeah, and I don't think I've mentioned the black mangroves to grow a little bit further inland than the reds.
Yeah. So if you are, you know, looking at a cross section of the ocean hitting the land and going inland, you would see at the ocean or at the bay or wherever, red mangroves on the shoreline actually growing into the ocean, depending on where the tide is behind them. You would have the black mangroves on slightly higher ground, and then behind those on the highest ground you would have the white mangroves. And that's what it would look like.
You put it all together, well, you have as a mangrove forest also known as a mangal.
A mangal, which is one of the more amazing We're gonna be talking about a lot of amazing things about mangroves and mangoals. But it's the only species of tree that can grow in salt water, and big time they grow. And it's not like they love the salt. We'll see in a minute. They have some great ways of getting rid of it, but they figured all that stuff out. But they can grow in salinity levels of seventy five parts per thousand, which is about twice as salty as ocean water.
Yeah, that's pretty impressive because I mean, where are they growing that's twice as salty as ocean water? You know, I think that's just kind of showing off at that point.
Well, I didn't know if like that inland water, like just accumulate salt or something.
Yeah, I would, Yeah, I think you might be right. Yeah, yeah, I think you've hit upon it. Okay, So they're not show offs. They're just doing what they've got to do. I mean that they're making lemonade out of the lemons that they were handed by natural selection for where they grow.
So what about the salt. How do they get rid of it?
So you would think like they just they can drink salt water and use it like you know terrestrial trees use water. Not true. There's actually two techniques where they can either keep salt from entering their roots or they can take the salt in and then get rid of it in certain ways. And so that means that there's two types secreters and non secrets. And black mangroves are secrets, I believe, right.
That's right. Those are the ones with a little nubby they look like sticks almost sticking out of the water. They filter it out and they secrete it on the leaves. So that means if you see a black mangrove and you see some you know, kind of chalky white stuff on the leaf that is salt, like goat, well, I don't know if I should say go lick it, because I don't know if that's dangerous salt, but it's.
Just trust me, it tastes like salt and DDT gosh. Red mangroves they're non secrets. So they actually just don't allow salt to be taken up by their roots. Now that's easier said than done, because their roots are planted in the water, right, so there's water. They're taking up water from the ocean, from salt water. And what they do is they have cell walls that actually act through reverse osmosis. It lets water through, but it doesn't let
solids through, which is quite a trick. I mean, that's something that humans have only recently figured out how to do. Mangroves have been doing it for who knows how many hundreds of thousands or millions of years. But they do it in part because they have this hydrophobic, lipophilic material called suberin that really serves them.
Well, that's right. It allows them to get rid of more than ninety percent of the salts in the water, which also means which I better really think about until just now, that they can literally toller I guess about ten percent salt content.
Yeah, I saw ninety to ninety five percent. But yeah, that's still a lot of salt for a plant, totally. Yeah. So they have at least adapted in some ways to tolerate salt more than other plants. But for the most part, they're just really good at at keeping salt from being taken up by their roots. I just find that fascinating.
And I love how Dave puts these. His sections are labeled either mangrove Magic Tricks or what was the other one, mangrove Superpowers. Yeah, and that's pretty fun.
They're both apt they are.
So this is magic trick number two. Is we mentioned? You know, I mentioned earlier that they actually breathe through these roots. I think typically you might like to think about plants as you know, just eating up that CO two, which they definitely do. But plants need oxygen and they need to get oxygen from the roots, and you know, with a regular tree and a regular forest, they're getting that like through the soil and these little gaps between
the soil in mangrove or mangols. I guess you would say they can't do that because the tidal sediments come in and it's all water log and compacted, so they don't have those air gaps that you have in a normal forest. So they kind of came up with a brilliant little trick to get around that, right.
Yeah. So the pneumataphors 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 lenisoles, 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.
Just pretty and nu metaphor actually is Greek for air carrier, so makes sense. Pretty on the nose.
Yeah, some of those new metaphors can reach up to ten feet tall. Did you see that?
Yeah? I didn't. I looked at a lot of pictures. I didn't see any. That's all with my eyeballs, but I looked because I wanted to see that.
Yeah, I didn't see it either, could be made up.
So then you've got this, I don't think. So. Then you've got these red mangroves that we talked about for my money, like the money mangrove, and those proper roots serve the same purpose as the new metaphors. They you know, like I said, they sit up on those long, sort of curvy stilts and they stay above water, like a lot of it stays above water even at high tide at times, and they are also covered with those linisols and they do the same thing. They allow for that oxygen exchange to take place.
Yeah, so that explains also why there's so many roots and so many noumataphors 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 like 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.
Yeah, it's like a tree that is dropped trow.
That's exactly right. It's porky pig in it.
Should we should we take a break at mangrove Magic trick number two?
Yeah?
To number three?
Pick Yeah, we'll come back with number three right after this.
Shit.
So, Chuck, which mangrove is your favorite kind?
Well, I think I've been clear. I know you're teasing me because me and my red mangrove tirades. To me, this is the best part of the episode and the most amazing thing that maybe besides, and we'll get to carbon sequestration because it's amazing too. But to me, this just knocked my socks off that mangroves kind of give birth to baby mangroves.
I think the only reason you want to qualify it with kind of is because our mind rails against accepting that that's what's going on. But that is what's going on for all intents and purposes. That some mangroves are viviparous, meaning that it means live bearing to where they have seeds on their plants that they develop. They're about acorn sized.
But then rather than the seed falling off and dispersing and then eventually growing into a seedling, something much more mind blowing happens with mangoes.
That's right. The seedling is actually produced on the tree itself, and they they sort of that sort of I keep qualifying it, They self plant themselves. Eventually this thing is going to fall off. You've got to look up the
video on the internet. There are many out there where it shows these you know, acorn like things, they grow down to these sort of long arrow like, you know, green arrows that are pointing down and eventually they just go whoop, and they snap off and they go straight down and they either stick into the ground at low tide or I saw them in two feet of ocean water, just going straight through and sticking into the sand and they plant themselves.
They do. They plant themselves in that sandy bottom, and then they sprout roots really fast. I saw that they can start growing roots within hours, which means that also if they don't fall straight down, if they fall and they land on their side, they can actually stay themselves up by growing roots on the ground facing side and then grow roots on the other side as well, which
is pretty amazing. What's even more amazing is that if they fall, they happen to fall it like high tide, and it's pretty deep, and they never touch the bottom in any way. They'll float along, they'll go out to sea and as they're out to see they're a little tree growing like growing leaves, getting water from the ocean and doing photosynthesis in the sunlight. And they can float around for up to a year before they make land and stand themselves up and grow roots wherever they land.
It's just unbelievable because this was an evolutionary adaptation. Because my first thought was, well, why doesn't the acorn like seed just fall into the water and float around. But it must have just not been able to survive and got water logged and died and adapted to grow on the tree itself and get that little seedling started.
Yeah, because think about this, chuck. A seedling is a small, viable tree. It has everything it needs to grow. So it's an individual organism. And when the mangrove is growing the seedling on its tree, on itself, that's gestation. Because when it drops off, it's like a girafte dropping a baby out like three or four feet above above the ground. It's the same thing. It's gestation. It's a live birth of a plant. It's nuts, man, I love it.
And the baby draft sticks its nose into the ground. It grows from there for.
Months and months, plant some roots out of its head, and there you go.
Let's talk about the mangoals a little bit. We've talked about the fact that these forests are very dense, but it is a dense ecosystem that is dense in more ways than one. It's not just all these gnarly roots that you see everywhere. There are all kinds of fish habitats and wildlife habitats that exist in these mangoals.
Yeah. One of the reason why these root systems and why the above water parts of the trees are all just so thick, like you were saying it's so hard to get through, is because of the way that they drop seedlings right off of their tree right around them.
So these mangols develop into these really thick deposits of trees and shrubs above water and below water because they grow so closely together, and as they grow, they migrate one way or another, or they just spread out one way or another, sometimes towards the ocean, sometimes behind them, sometimes to either side of the shore. But that's how they grow, and that's why they're so dense too, and.
That provides a lot of protection for these habitats. They are all manner of fish. If you're in Florida, you're gonna see gray snapper in there, or you probably won't see them snook tarpin. This is pretty remarkable that goliath grouper, which is actually endangered, spends their first six years in that mangol before it goes to open water.
Yeah, and it's not like a few kinds of fish, like things like octopi sharks, shrimp, molluscs, just tons of different kinds of fish, Like this is their nursery ground because these roots, these tangle of roots, provide a place for juveniles to hide out of reach of predators and get bigger and bigger because it's also a very nourishing place for them to eat too. So they're really really important as nurseries for all kinds of sea life.
Yeah, and if you're talking about eating seafood, the commercial fishing industry, and this just sort of shows you how important these mangoals are. A one square mile loss of mangroves, for us would lose about two hundred and seventy five thousand pounds of fish every year. And then that's not even to speak of all the indigenous communities that rely on these fish to provide their sustenance.
Right, And so that's just the below water part of the mangol. The above water part of the mangol basically does the same thing. But for terrestrial and arboreal animals like monkeys, insects, reptiles, birds, they make their home and their nurseries in those the mangols too. The branches, the leaves, the trunks, those are really just as important for above ground animals as they are for below water animals.
Yeah. And you mentioned that Bengal tiger. This was also in the sum darbins, right. Yes, And this is the largest single population of Bengal tigers on planet Earth, and it's only about one hundred of them, but they live in these mangols.
Yes. And also attention, Kristen Bell, if you are ambivalent about mangrove forests, prepared to care because in Panama, the pigmy three toadsloth, critically endangered by the way, only makes its home in mangrove forests. Sound there, right, So you got to care now.
I still watch that video of her in that sloth about once every two years. Yes, It's just one of the great human reactions to something.
Yeah. And I remember how hardened we were when we realized that she didn't touch it, even though you clearly wanted to more than she's ever wanted to do anything in her life. But she doesn't. She didn't do it, you know, so good for her.
It's pretty great. I think we can move on to some superpowers, right.
Yeah, mangrove superpower number one, which is coastline protection, which is pretty important if you live along the coast.
Yeah, this is a big one. One great benefit of all those above ground gnarly mess of roots that are everywhere is and it just makes perfect common sense when you look at them. Is they make great wave breaks any kind of wave, even like a tsunamic.
Is that a word?
Yeah?
It is now I think it's a great word. Right.
Tsunami's wave is going to be cut down big time when it hits. This stuff is just gonna, you know, just cut through and disperse it in in a really profound way.
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 compare it, if you combine that, i should say, with the really low oxygen environments that make up the mucky bottom in a mangrove mangal I guess you can kind of flash back 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 ocean's layering with the mucky sediment that 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 they outpaces sea level rises in some areas.
Yeah. I mean this kind of falls under one of their other superpowers is the fact that they are literally sequestering carbon. But I think that they add about and we'll get to that in more detail in a minute. But in Australia, some mangrove or some mangals in Australian belize at about ten millimeters or more of coastal soil
each year one hundredth of a meter. Yeah, I mean, that doesn't sound like that much, but a sea level rise is coming in at about three point two meters a year or so in parts of Australian belize it is actually outpacing climate change.
Yeah, that's pretty cool, and that's really really important because the sea levels rise. If the soil level is rising, we don't have to work quite as much about sea level rise there. But that's only in some spots, as we'll see.
Yeah, and as far as the waves go, and we're talking about tsunamis well with just regular waves. For every one hundred meters of a mangro forest that a wave will hit, its height can decrease by as much as sixty six percent.
Wow.
And if you're looking at storm surges, which is you know, one of the big dangers, it's not just the wave, it's that water surge. If you listen to our tsunami episode, there was a study that found that surge depths were reduced about a little over a foot and a half for every little more than a half a mile fifty
centimeters over every kilometer. And that doesn't sound like a ton, but if you've got a mangrove forest that's you know, several miles deep, then we're talking you know, six or seven feet of less storm surge happening, and that can make a really big difference. In flow.
Oh yeah, because the storm surges would get you. I mean it can flood miles and miles inland. It carries all sorts of debris with it. It has so much energy it can just rip buildings down. It's a real problem from hurricanes. It's that flooding from the storm surge. But because those mangroves are there to absorb a bunch of that energy, it just doesn't have the opportunity to come
nearly as far inland. So mangrove forests, especially thick ones, save human lives and you would guess animal lives too.
Yeah, And we've seen the sort of this bear out in very sad ways when mangro forests have disappeared. I think it was in the Indo Pacific region in the nineteen fifties they used to have about five miles like deep of mangrove forest. By the nineteen nineties they were depleted because of shrimp farming. We'll talk about that later
as well, but basically, you know, human cause depletion. And in ninety one there was a cyclone that hit the coast of Bangladesh where there were no longer any mangrove for us to cut down on that impact and there was no buffer, and there was a big twenty foot storm surge and almost one hundred and forty thousand people died, right.
I saw that they had a lot of those people died because they weren't they didn't use storm shelters in addition to the mangrove buffer being gone, and that they had built the storm shelters Chuck after a nineteen seventy cyclone that killed five hundred thousand people in Bangladesh.
Wow, can you believe that?
Can you imagine a storm killing half a million people in your country or your little area.
That's insane, it is, that's devastating.
Biblical you know.
Yeah. They did some studies too with the tsunami and the Indian Ocean in two thousand and four, and they found that the mangroves there were about one hundred meters deep and they at least helped reduce those waves between five and thirty percent. So that's a big deal. You know, six feet of storm surge up to thirty percent of wave height and the initial rush in from the ocean is you're saving a lot of lives in that case.
Yeah, And I mean you saw how bad the Indian Ocean tsunami was too. It just makes you wonder, like how much worse it could have been without mangroves. So I say we take our second break and we come back and talk about carbon sequestration.
That's right, aka superpower number two. All right, we had promise of superpower number two and we tease a little bit early earlier I did about carbon sequestration. So we need to talk a little bit about what people are calling a blue carbon ecosystem, blue sort of referencing the ocean.
Yeah, it's it's basically the same thing. Like you know, trees inland capturing carbon and storing them in their bits and parts. This is this is just coastal vegetation doing the same thing. And the thing is is, like trees, they're really efficient at capturing carbon and storing it. But because of our friends fungi and rot, when the tree dies, that carbon gets released back into the ecosystem and even possibly back into the atmosphere if say, like a wildfire happens atmosphere hot wheels.
That is right, But you know how we mentioned before that with that soil that the water is basically the ocean water is just sitting on top of it is not it's just building up to that salty peat and that carbon is not being released like it does in interrestrial forest, and it's not breaking down. So it is a champion at storing carbon. Not only good at it, but really good at it.
Yeah, it's like the Judah Friedlander of forests as far as carbon sequestration go.
I love Judi Freelander. We actually met him once, but I don't get the joke.
Oh he always wore a hat that'said World Show. Oh okay, and he was always boasting about stuff like that.
Yeah, yeah, I love that guy. When we met him at an event with Jesse Thorn and Hodgemen many years ago, and this was kind of during his run on thirty Rock thirty Rock, and this is when I was also wearing my Last Chance garage at all the time, which I haven't put on in a couple of years. I hate to say so probably a few years. But he I remember when I met him, he went and in that face of his he kind of peered up at my hat and that patch and hear it. All right, okay, cool.
That was a great chee the freed Land.
I was like, Okay, I got the stamp of approval from the hat guy.
Yeah, definitely the hat guy version.
It's cool.
So but yeah, so, mangroves are the champion of carbon sequestrations, so much so that they are four times more efficient than terrestrial vegetation at storing carbon, which makes them like a bona fide carbon sink. Mangrove forests are and again it's because there's just no decay, there's no fungus, there's no rot. All the stuff that all the vegetation that dies and falls down into the muck just gets stuck there and covered over and doesn't get a chance to
break down. So as long as you don't dig up or destroy a mangro forest and cut up the peat to use it as cheap fuel, you've got a really good carbon sink on your hands.
Yeah. To the tune of worldwide mangal's account for about six point four billion tons of carbon that's being held in check. That means when you do do something like you hinted at, it can have devastating effects for the world. Surprise, surprise, If you cut down a mangrove forest, that carbon is going to be released, That sequestered carbon is slowly going
to creep back into the atmosphere. From twenty to twenty fifteen, roughly one hundred and twenty two million tons of carbon extra carbon were released into the atmosphere because of the destruction of mangrove forests, and between eighty and two thousand and thirty percent of the mangols of the world have been stripped away and it is outpacing like the tropical rainforest construction.
That's mind boggling because if you just hear the figures on how frequently and how much rainforest is cut down, the idea that mangrove forest is outpacing it is pretty nuts. But apparently Me and Mar is the current hot spot for mangrove D four station. Between nineteen ninety six and twenty sixteen, Me and Mark cut down sixty percent of its mangals just gone. And part of the problem is
is like you can restore mangrove forest. Fortunately, we'll talk about some people who do that, but it can take a while. And sometimes when you restore some mangroves, you put the seedlings in and typhoon or a cyclone or a hurricane comes along and just washes them all away. So if your timing's wrong. It might take a very long time for you to restore a mangrove forest, so it's not something you want to cut down willy nilly. Basically, No.
Shrimp farming is something we mentioned earlier in passing. But they are the biggest culprit, responsible for thirty five percent of mangrove forest loss. And you know, people love shrimp all around the world, and in Thailand in the eighties and nineties and other places as well, but especially Thailand, they cut down a lot of mangro forests to make these shrimp farms along the hostline. And then you've also
got the sea level rise that's causing destruction. We mentioned parts of Australian belize that those soiled deposits are outpacing it, but that's only in a couple of those places. It is not doing that in other areas.
No, So that means that sea level rise is out pacing soil deposition there. I want to say one more thing about shrimp farming too. I looked a little bit into it and I cannot decide maybe it deserves its
own episode. Who knows. Okay, one of the other problems with shrimp farming in addition to a shrimp farm sharing the same kind of land or a mangro forest that land occupies being desirable for a shrimp farm, so you cut down mangro forest to build a shrimp farm, is that when you harvest shrimp, you basically have to refresh
the water. So shrimp farmers typically just basically open a dam and let all the water out, and that water's filled with tons of nutrients that overwhelm the carrying opacity of the ecosystems the mangro forests around the shrimp farm, and you get what's called an algae bloom, which sucks up all the oxygen, kills off all the fish, and has just this devastating effect on the ecosystem surrounding it.
So shrimp farming is really hard on the areas where it takes place, not just from the shrimp farms themselves, but from what comes out of the shrimp farms as well. And there's just so many basic good best practices that could be followed that just aren't followed that there's almost like a general like the coming out of the shrimp farming industry as far as I can tell, that really needs to be fixed.
It's almost as if they just wanted to continue to make as much money as they can before they're regulated in some way.
But I mean, what are you going to do if you try to regulate them at all? You've got a nanny state on your hands. And who wants that?
Yeah, and it shrimp farming is just one tiny fraction of the great amounts of harm that are happening to the because of lots of things, but commercial fishing and is certainly one of them.
I will say, though, it's really hard to turn down shrimp on pizza that you're heading or something. No, no, that's that was from years back. I used to love shrimp on pizza.
All right, talk to me more about this. What are we talking? You just throw some shrimp on a regular cheese or is it like a barbecue pineapple thing?
No?
No, no, no, no, a regular pizza. But you don't want to use just any shrimp. You certainly don't want to use jumbo shrimp. You want to use the little tiny salad shrimp because they cook just enough with the pizza. Bigger shrimp might still be partially raw, it's going to be too big to eat. Yeah, you just throw some of those. Well, now, I think they usually come already cook now that I think about it, but you just throw a couple of handfuls on your pizza, put it
in the oven, and they thank me later. Basically, Oh, man, I love shrimp.
I don't know about shrimp and pizza.
Well, now I feel bad about eating shrimp, knowing how bad shrimp farming is.
I know. It's uh, it's another wake up call, isn't it.
Well, yes, and I've been awokened because I'm now farming my own shrimp here at home in a very sustainable manner so that I can have it on my pizza.
Ah, bathub shrimp, It's delicious.
We don't take baths anyway.
Yeah, Yiman's like, why do you have an out of orders on on our bathroom door?
Right? I'm still trying to figure out how to break the news to U me we don't really have a working bathsub anymore. So.
There are also invasive species that can totally wreck the health of a man gaul. In the seventies in China, they were trying to do the right thing. I think there were conservationists that transplanted some marsh grasses that were from the United States there to try and slow erosion, but it crowded out mangroves. And then in Texas they weren't trying to do the right thing. They the vision game officials there, they said, Hey, people like hunting this
exotic Asian antelope. It's called a nilghai. I guess n ilgai. So let's put them in Texas so people can hunt them. And it turns out they love to eat mangroves.
Yeah, so they're being deforested by the game that was imported to Texas to hunt, which means I'm sure there's huge bounties on these things now too.
Yeah, and that's funny how that all works out.
So there are people who are like, we really need to work on this, We need to get mangroves back, and there are places where this is the good news. Mangrove deforestation globally speaking, on average has actually stopped progressing and is now starting to decline.
Yeah.
The deforestation is so people are, you know, kind of getting hip to the idea that we really need these things. They provide countless services for us humans, so even the most selfish human can get behind mangrove restoration, right.
Yeah, I mean I think there's about forty two percent of the worldwide mangols are protected now, but you need that number at like ninety two, well at one hundred. But I would feel much better if it was like in the eighties or nineties, you know.
Yeah, And not only that, like areas that have been developed coastly need to replant the mangroves that they cut down to build because they need them really bad. You need mangrove buffers, as we've found. Whatever you can get is helpful.
That's right. But there's another kind of clever financial instrument, as they call it, called blue bonds. It is a subset of green bonds. Green bonds came around a while ago, and these are basically, if you have money and you want to invest responsibly in a way that not only doesn't impact the environment but can help the environment, you invest in a green bond, or if you're really into the ocean, the subset of blue bonds, which were first introduced in twenty eighteen.
Right, And so like you want to offset your emissions, you buy a blue bond, and all of a sudden, you've just paid somebody to go plant some mango or not mango, maybe mango too, but mangrove forests.
Right, yeah, mango forest.
It sounds delicious, would be I'd be like planet in my backyard. That's right, I want to plane it with my blue bond.
So look into blue bonds and green bonds. It's I saw something depressing the other day when they were I don't know what they were talking about on the news, but they basically said, like, if you have an IRA like, you were supporting all kinds of companies that you would probably never support in real life.
Oh yeah, definitely mutual funds.
Yeah, mutual funds. Just everything's all lumped in. So they were trying to encourage people that if they're able to to be a little more selective in what they choose to invest in.
Well, there's a lot of sustainable mutual funds too that where they're you know, very carefully selected. Unfortunately, that means the management fee is going to be higher. But if you care, it doesn't really matter, you know.
Oh, is it really a higher management fee?
Yeah, any time it requires any additional thought or effort, the management he just automatically goes up.
I had to click them three extra things.
Right, I had to find out what these blue bonds were that's my impression of a mutual fund manager.
Yeah, financial advisor. If that's your financial advisors, another wrong person.
I meet him at Burger King every couple of weeks in the back.
Yeah, where else did you meet?
You got anything else?
You got nothing else?
Up with Mangroves, Up with Mangroves. And since we both set up with Mangroves, everybody, that means it's time for a listener mail.
This is a thank you from a Satanist. We had a great podcast that we must have put this on a select recently.
I guess yeah, like two weeks ago.
Okay, Hey, guys discovered your podcast in twenty eleven. Have been hooked ever since. Your informative, banter filled episodes remained a welcome constant in my life throughout college, adult years in now parenthood was helping me stay sane during sleepless nights with my newborns. When I saw the episode on Satanism guess ahead and listen to it previously, I was simultaneously excited and nervous. I would hope you'd give it the usual Josh and Chuck treatment, and I was not disappointed.
Over the years, I've been given a lot of grief. Being a Satanist, people often assume that I'm a very devout Christian based on the way I look, and often go from praising me to threatening my family upon learning that I followed the tenants set forth by the Satanic Temple by shedding some light on the true nature of Satanism, I feel that you have given many people a look into the practice in a non threatening way, and hopefully this will help people choose kindness over fear based hatred
when interacting with Satanist in the future. And thank you for being bold enough to put this episode out in the world. I'm sure it wasn't that easy, but this long time listener appreciates it. Your friendly Satanist. Donna, thanks a lot, Donna, Donna a Satanist.
Yeah, that was a good one because I went back and listened to it to QA it before it was a selectime. I was like, this is a really good episode. Yeah.
But there was one thing at the beginning, Chuck, that now I wish we had back, because a couple of people wrote in and it was that we coaight at the beginning, saying like, if you're, you know, a Christian, you probably don't want to listen to this, and people wrote in and said, no, like you, you should not have said that, because there's plenty of people out there who should hear this and you know, change their views
on people who hold these views. So if you go back and listen to that, just plug your ears for that first part and then listen to it through again.
Yeah, that was forty year old Chuck talking, right, not fifty one year old Chuck.
That's right.
It's Oh, that's a weird number to say.
It is, Chuck. Fifty one is a weird number, and it's going to be a weird time in your life. I'm sure of it.
Juck. That's one thing I'll always say it is You'll always be younger than me. No matter how much I want you to speed up the aging process, You'll always be younger.
You would have to travel to Mars and suspended animation and I might just have to stay here on.
Earth for me to catch all right, I'm going to look into that.
Thanks a lot, Donna. We appreciate that big time. And if you want to be like Donna and send us some kudos, we'll take them. You can send it in an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.