Inland mangroves reveal a tumultuous climatic past — and hint at our future

[UngulateNerd92]

• A new study concludes that the presence of inland mangroves along a river in southern Mexico was the result of climate change-driven sea level rise during the Pleistocene Epoch, some 115,000 to 130,000 years ago.
• The researchers’ analysis of the genetic history of the mangrove trees suggests that they are closely related to trees found on the coastline, and sediments nearby are similar to those found in ocean environments.
• Publishing their work Oct. 12 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team notes that their research highlights the impacts of global climate change.

Exequiel Ezcurra was dubious when he first heard about the possibility of mangroves on the San Pedro Mártir River in southern Mexico from Carlos Burelo-Ramos, a botanist at Mexico’s University of Tabasco. The red mangrove tree (Rhizophora mangle) does inhabit freshwater environs — Cuba’s Bay of Pigs and the Florida Everglades are two notable examples.

But mangroves sitting at least 170 kilometers (106 miles) inland? That seemed unlikely.

“You probably got your botanical identification wrong because it doesn’t seem plausible that mangroves are growing in a river with freshwater at such a distance from the coast,” Ezcurra, a professor of ecology at the University of California, Riverside, told Burelo-Ramos.

But a confident Burelo-Ramos pushed back, respectfully telling Ezcurra, “I’m a good taxonomist. I know my plants, and this is red mangrove.”

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