Stuff You Should Know - Selects: Mangroves: Nature's Best Tree?

Episode Date: March 14, 2026

Mangroves are incredible survivors and adapters. They're also amazing at lessening the impact of tropical storms and climate change. And heck, they're cool looking. So jump into the brackish waters and have a listen to this classic episode all about these beauts.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It may have been about sex. Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 tell you what, I fell in love with these things. are amazing.

Mangros, colon, nature's best tree? I think so. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey, and 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. Mangroes, gather around while we talk about mangroves. 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, man, like riding the bikes around 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, I mean, you've seen them in person, I'm sure, like just how dense these things are. And, you know, we're going to be talking about different kinds,

but really sort of the money mangroves 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 Ruse 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 80 or 90 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, 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 and what makes mangrove 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 1% of the forests of the world, mangrove forests are. But it's still 85,000 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 Sundarbons. And that's where the Bengal tiger lives, which is. pretty cool. Agreed. They exist in 118 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. I did see some people that were like, oh, so mangroves. But it's not true. It looks like the closest mangroves are about 40 miles from the Georgia border near the Georgia coastline. So I was really sad that we don't have our mangroves. They is sad. But they do have them in Florida, in Louisiana, in Texas, and 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 subtropical. You've never stood on the equator. I never have. And I think I should. I've never been to Ecuador. Well, we should go sometime. We should do a podcast live from the equator. Yeah, and see if we melt.

I know I will. Yeah, I would too. I'm melting this week. As far as 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 prop roots that, and if you've never seen a mangrove, 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 and to 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. 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 there's just 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 pneumatophores and just put a pin in this. 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. That's 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 in brackish or salty water and 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 mentioned the black mangroves

do 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. What you have is a mangrove forest, also known as a mangall.

a mangal which is one of the more amazing we talk about a lot of amazing things about mangroves and mangalls 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 75 parts per thousand which is about twice as salt Salty is 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 accumulates salt or something. Yeah, I would...

Maybe? Maybe? Maybe. 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's a guess.

They're making lemonade out of the lemons that they were handed by now. natural selection for where they grow. So what about the salt? How do they get rid of it? So you would think like 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-secretors. And black mangroves are

secretors, 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 kind of chalky white stuff on the leaf, that is salt. Like go. I don't know if I should say go lick it because I don't know if that's dangerous. It's salty. Just trust me. It tastes like salt and DDT. Oh, gosh. Red mangroves, they're not. consecrators. 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 Suburin that really serves them well. That's right. It allows them to get rid of more than 90% of the salts in the water, which also means, which I didn't really think about until just now, that they can literally tolerate, I guess, about 10% salt content. Yeah, I saw 90 to 95%. 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 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.

Which is 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 CO2, 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 mangalls I guess you would say they can't do that because the tidal

sediments come in and it's all waterlog 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 pneumatophores 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 wall and they're covered in these little cells called lennousals, 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, which is pretty nuts. And pneumathora actually is Greek for air carrier, so. Makes sense. Pretty on the nose. Yeah, some of those pneumatophores can reach up to 10 feet tall. Did you see that? Yeah, I didn't, I looked at a lot of pictures. I didn't see any that tall with my eyeballs, but I'd 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 pneumatophores. 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 linnocles 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 nematophores 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 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.

It is. It's exactly right. It's porky pig in it. Should we take a break at, Mangrove Magic Trick number two. Yeah, we'll come back with number three right after this. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available.

I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%, I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more. to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory. We got it wrong.

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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 may, besides, and we'll get to carbon sequestration, because that'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 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 mangroves. That's right. The seedling is actually produced on the tree itself.

And they sort of, not 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 acorn-like things. They grow down to these sort of long arrow like green arrows that are pointing down. And eventually they just go, boop, 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 stand 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 at 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 sea, 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 don't, 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 waterlogged 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 giraffe dropping a baby out, like three or four feet 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 giraffe sticks its nose into the ground and grows from there for months and months. Plant some roots out of its head, and there you go. Let's talk about the mangalls 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 mangalls. 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 mangals 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 toward 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're all manner of fish. If you're in Florida, you're going to see great. snapper in there, or you probably won't see him. Snook, Tarpen,

this is pretty remarkable. The Goliath grouper, which is actually endangered, spends their first six years in that mangal before it goes to open water. Yeah, and it's not just like a few kinds of fish, like things like octopi, sharks,

shrimp, mollusks, 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, like, 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 mangals are, a one square mile loss of mangroves forest would lose about 275,000 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 mangal. The above-water part of the mangal 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 mangals 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 Darbans, right? Yes. And this is the largest single population of Bengal tigers on planet Earth, and it's only about 100 of them. but they live in these mangals. Yes, and also attention, Kristen Bell.

If you are ambivalent about mangrove forests, prepare to care, because in Panama, the Pygmy Three Toad Sloth, critically endangered, by the way, only makes its home in mangrove forests down there. That's right. So you've got to care now. I still watch that video of hurting that sloth about once every two years. Yeah, it's a good one. It's just one of the great human reactions to something.

Yeah, and I remember how heartened we were when we realized that she didn't touch it, even though she 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. That's pretty great. I think we can move on to some superpowers, right? Yeah, Mangrove's 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 tsunami, is that a word? It is now. I think it's a great word. Right. Tsunamis wave is going to be cut down big time when it hits this stuff. It's just going to, you know, just cut through and disperse it 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, 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 oceans layering with the mucky sediment that from the mangroves falling in. to 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 it 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 mangalls in Australian Belize at about 10 millimeters or more of coastal soil each year.

A hundredth of a meter. Yeah, I mean, that doesn't sound like that much. But sea level rise is coming in at about 3.2 meters a year. 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 worry 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 hundred meters of a mangrove forest that a wave will hit, its height can decrease by as much as 66%. 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, 50 centimeters over every kilometer.

And that doesn't sound like a ton, but if you've got a mangrove forest that's several miles deep, then we're talking six or seven feet of less storm surge happening. And that can make a really big difference in flooding. Oh, yeah, because the storm surge is what gets 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 sort of this bear out in very sad ways when mangrove forests have disappeared. I think it was in the Indo-Pacific region. In the 1950s, they used to have about five miles deep of mangrove forest.

By the 1990s, they were depleted because of shrimp farming. We'll talk about that later as well. But basically, you know, human-caused depletion. And in 91, there was a cyclone that hit the coast of Bangladesh, where there were no longer any mangrove forest to cut down on that impact. And there was no buffer. And there was a big 20-foot storm surge. And almost 140,000 people died.

Right. I saw that they had a lot of those people died because 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 1970s cyclone that killed 500,000. 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. Like it's biblical, you know? Yeah. They did some studies, too, with the tsunami and the Indian Ocean in 2004. And they found that the mangroves there were about 100 meters deep, and they at least helped

reduce those waves between 5 and 30 percent. So that's a big deal. You know, six feet of storm surge, up to 30 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. 2%. That is the number of people who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter, and on my podcast, 2%. I break down the science of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange, modern world. I'll be speaking with writers, researchers, and other health and fitness experts, and more to look past the impractical and way too complex pseudoscience that dominates the wellness industry. We really believe that seed oils were inherently inflammatory.

We got it wrong. Many of the problems that we are freaked out about in the world are the result of stress. Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's T-W-O-P-P-Cent on the I-Hart Radio. App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Serving Pancakes podcast, conversations about volleyball go beyond the court. Today we have a little best friend compatibility test. Okay. How long have we been best friends for?

Since the day we met. As the League One volleyball season heads towards its final stretch, there's no better time to tune in. We really are like yin and yang, vodka and tequila. You'll hear unfiltered analysis, behind-the-scenes stories and conversations with leaders making an impact across the sport. Today we have Logan Lednecky. I feel like our fan base in general is very connected. Just like a comforting feeling getting to play at home. Whether you're following the final push of love season or just love the game,

serving pancakes brings you closer to the action and the people shaping the future of volleyball. Jordan Thompson had that microphone out. God forbid we make mistakes or cuss at our coach. Like when talking or two times. Open your free IHeartRadio app. Search Serving Pancakes and listen now. This has been Serving Pancakes and we'll catch you on the flip side. Okay.

Presented by Capital One, founding partner of I Heart Women's Sports. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. My latest episode is with Noah Kahn, the singer-songwriter behind the multi-platinum global hit stick season and one of the biggest voices in music today. Noah opens up about the pressure that followed his rapid success, his struggles with mental health and body image, and the fear of starting again after such a defining moment in his career.

It's easy to look at somebody and be like, Your life must be so sick. Man, you have no clue. Talking about the mental illness stuff, it used to be this thing that I was ashamed of. I'm just now trying to unwind this idea that I have to be unhealthy physically or in pain in some emotional way in my life

to create good music. If someone says that I did a good job, I'm like, yeah, I'm good. Someone says that I suck. I'm like, I suck. Getting to talk about this is not common for me. Right now I need it more than ever. Listen to On Purpose with Jay Chetty on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right, we had promise of superpower number two, and we teased 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 basically the same thing, like, you know, trees inland capturing carbon and storing them in their bits and parts. 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.

system 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 a terrestrial forest yeah 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 juda freedlander of forests as far as carbon sequestration goes i love juda freelander we actually met him once but i don't get the joke oh he always wore a hat that's a world champion oh okay and he was always boasting about stuff like that yeah yeah i love

that guy when we we met him at a event with jessie thorne and hodgeman many years ago And this was kind of during his run on... 30 Rock. 30 Rock. And this is when I was also wearing my last chance garage hat all the time, which I haven't put on in a couple of years. I hate to say so. Probably a few years.

But 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 he went, all right, okay, cool. That was a great Judah Friedland. I was like, hey, I got the stamp of approval from the hat guy. Yeah, definitely the hack guy for sure. It was cool. So, but yeah, so mangroves are the champion of carbon sequestration,

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 mangrove 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 Mangals account for about 6.4 billion tons of carbon that's being held in check. That means when you do do something, like you've 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 2000 to 2015, roughly 122 million tons of carbon. Extra carbon were released into the atmosphere because of the destruction of mangrove forests. And between 80 and 2000, 30% of the mangals of the world have been stripped away. and it is outpacing like the tropical rainforest destruction. 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 Myanmar is the current hotspot for mangrove deforestation. Between 1996 and 2016, Myanmar cut down 60% of its mangals. Just gone. Part of the problem is, 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 a 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 35% of mangrove forest loss. And, you know, people love shrimp all around the world. And in Thailand, in the 80s and 90s, and other places as well, but especially Thailand. They cut down a lot of mangrove forest to make these shrimp farms along the coastline. And then you've also got the sea level rise that's causing destruction. We mentioned parts of Australian Belize that those soil 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 rises outpacing soil deposition there. I want to say one more thing about shrimp farming, too. I looked a little bit into it. I cannot decide maybe it deserves its own episode. Who knows?

Oh, okay. One of the other problems with shrimp farming, in addition to a shrimp farm sharing the same kind of land or a mangrove forest that a land it occupies being desirable for a shrimp farm. So you cut down mangrove 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 capacity of the ecosystems, the mangrove 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, duh, 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 want 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 tried to regulate them at all, you've got a nanny state on your hands, and who wants that? Yeah, and shrimp farming is just one tiny fraction of the great amounts of harm that are happening to the ocean because of lots of things.

things, but commercial fishing is certainly one of them. I will say, though, it's really hard to turn down shrimp on pizza. Is that your thing or something? No, no, 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, regular pizza, but you don't want to use just any shrimp. You certainly don't want to use jumbo shrimp, or you want to use the little tiny salad shrimp because they cook just enough with the pizza. A bigger shrimp might still be partially raw. It's going to be too big to eat. Oh, you put it on their raw? Yeah, you just throw some of those. Well, now I think they usually come already cooked now that I think about it.

But you just throw a couple handfuls on your pizza, put it in the oven, and 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 another wake-up call. Well, yes, and I've been awoken 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, bathtub shrimp. That's right. This is delicious. We don't take baths anyway. Yeah. Yumi's like, why do you have an out-of-order sign on our bathroom door? Right. I'm still trying to figure out how to break the news to Yumi.

We don't really have a working bathtub anymore. So there are also invasive species that can totally. totally wreck the health of a mangal in the 70s 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. The fish and game officials there, they said, hey, people like hunting this exotic Asian antelope.

It's called a nilghai, I guess, N-I-L-G-A-I. 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, isn't that 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 42% of the worldwide mangals are protected now. Yeah. You need that number at like 90 to, well, at 100, but I would feel much better if it was like in the 80s or 90s, you know. Yeah, and not only that, like areas that have been developed closely 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 2018. Right. And so if you want to offset your emissions, you buy a blue bond and all of a sudden you've just paid some. somebody to go plant some mango or not mango maybe mango too but mangrove forests right yeah mango forest that sounds delicious it would be i'd be like planting it in my backyard that's where i want you

to plant it with my yeah bond so look into blue bonds and green bonds it's um 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 are 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 if they're able to be a little more selective

and what they choose to invest in. Well, there's a lot of sustainable mutual funds, too. That's right. 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, anytime it requires,

any additional thought or effort, the management fee just automatically goes up. I had to click on 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 advisor, you're going to the wrong person. Right.

I meet a 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 listener mail. This is a thank you from a Satanist. We had a great podcast. We must have put this on a select recently, I guess. Yeah, like two weeks ago. Okay. Hey, guys, discovered your podcast in 2011, have been hooked ever since. Your informative banter-filled episodes remained a welcome constant in my life throughout college, adult years, and now parenthood.

It was helping me stay sane during sleepless nights with my newborns. When I saw the episode on Satanism, I guess I hadn't listened 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 follow 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 to 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, the Satanist. Yeah, that was a good one because I went back and listened to it to QA it before it was a select. I was like, this was a really good episode. Yeah. But there was one thing at the first.

the beginning, Chuck, that now I wish we had back. Because a couple of people rode in. And it was that we C-O-8 at the beginning saying, like, if you're a Christian, you probably don't want to listen to this. And people wrote in and said, no, like, 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 40-year-old Chuck talking. Right. Not 51-year-old Chuck. That's right. That's a weird number to say. It is, Chuck. 51 is a weird number, and it's going to be a weird time in your life.

I'm sure of it. Shirk. That's it. That's the 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 in suspended animation, and I would just have to stay here on Earth. for me to catch up. 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.com. Stuff you should know is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts to My Heart Radio, visit the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 2%.

That's the number of people. who take the stairs when there is also an escalator available. I'm Michael Easter. I'm on my podcast, 2%. I break down the signs of mental toughness, fitness, and building resilience in our strange modern world. Put yourself through some hardships, and you will come out on the other side

a happier, more fulfilled, healthier person. Listen to 2%. That's TWA% on the I-HartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the Serving Pancakes podcast, conversations about volleyball go beyond the court. Today we have a little best friend compatibility test. Okay. How long have we been best friends? This is the day we met.

As the League One volleyball season heads towards its final stretch, there's no better time to tune in. You'll hear unfiltered analysis, behind-the-scenes stories, and conversations with leaders making an impact across the sport. Whether you're following the final push of love season or just love the game, serving pancakes, brings you closer to the action, and the people shaping the future of volleyball. Open your free IHeart Radio app, search Serving Pancakes, and listen now. Presented by Capital One, founding partner of IHeart Women's Sports. 10, 10, shots five in City Hall building. How could this have happened in City Hall?

Somebody tell me that. A shocking public murder. This was one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics. I scream, get down, get down. Those are shots. A tragedy that's now forgotten. And a mystery. That may or may not have been political.

That may have been about sex. Listen to Roershack, murder at City Hall on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.