3. Perry-op-THAL-mi-nee and New-MAT-ah-fors
Morning quiet in coastal mangrove forests is a subtle eco-symphony: crackles, pops, trills, shy wing whispers, mysterious plashes. Gentle sounds, accentuated by a background of humid stillness broken only by rhythmic water laps.
De-pruning from the day’s dive, I lie prone on the beach end of a weathered plywood deck. The boards dig into my hips, flatten my chest. I’m staring at the mud, intently focused on mind-bogglingly ugly critters. Critters so highly original they’re only found in a narrow latitudinal band of mangrove estuaries and intertidal mudflats in the Indo-Pacific and the Atlantic coast of Africa. Actually finding them involves quite a bit of mud-staring, as these organisms are cryptic, the opposite of wildly colorful tropical fish.
In a cartoon line-up of wacked-out creatures, mudskippers (tribe Periophthalmini) would win first place in the Strange-But-True category.
Buggy eyes planted on the tippy-tops of pointy heads. Slick, pulsing sides sucking in and out. Fishy body poured into a grayish tan-brown camouflage suit, rendering them virtually invisible on their home turf. About the size of your thumb. Crazy fast. Perched on tiny motile fins appearing too fragile to propel their owners across muddy terrain in a plip-plop-blink-and-they’re-gone evasion maneuver.
Swoon!
Mudskippers are completely amphibious: land-dwelling, mangrove-hopping fish bridging both sides of our primordial, slimy origins. Muscling their way in and out of water, within saline and freshwater habitats, they sport the sort of wigged-out physiologies that make Superman look like a wimp. Scientific truth is crazier than fiction for mudskippers, who:
1. Breathe air through their skin.
2. Haul their own water supplies.
3. Build underground air chambers.
4. Self-regulate their body temperature.
5. Hunt carnivorously, capturing insects, fish, worms, and crustaceans.
For humans to do all that, we’d have emerged from the womb equipped with scuba gear, oxygen re-breathers, water tanks, motorized shovels, massive pinchers, a portable space heater, an air-conditioner, a high-powered rifle, and a trash compactor thrown in for good measure.
As long as they stay moist, mudskippers can respire through their skins, mouth linings, and throats. These little suckers even have suckers on their little chinny-chin-chins. Specially enlarged gills holding water instead of oxygen allow mudskippers to remain on land for hours at a time. When they burrow into the mud, even when submerged, the mudskippers maintain tiny air bubble pockets, breathing at very, very low oxygen concentrations while simultaneously thermoregulating.
Any marine biologist will testify to the bizarre talents of the ocean’s populations: papas who hatch eggs in their mouths or bellies, fish who change from male to female (and vice-versa), build nests, generate electricity, sport night lights, and blow their own sleeping-bag-bubbles. I think these enchantingly grotesque earth-fishies take the cake.
Perhaps I’ll have the fortune of being reincarnated as a mudskipper. I find them utterly beguiling, worthy of hours of lugubrious stalking.
In the wild kingdom of the mudflats, two organisms – a terrestrial fish and an aquatic tree – rule with hidden superpowers. Mudskippers and mangroves, a.k.a. mudflat heroes.
Mangroves, the home turf of mudskippers, demonstrate equally awesome abilities, but in a more sedentary fashion. From a distance, mangroves look like small-leafed, mild-mannered tree maidens perched on skinny stilettos. This is a clever disguise: mangroves are kick-ass trees, capable of thriving in adverse conditions most of their arboreal relatives could never survive.
Depending on the species, location, and mix of environmental stressors they deal with, mangroves can breathe through root-snorkels, make salt disappear, create their own toxic waste conversion facilities, and set up emergency gas-delivery systems in their legs and feet, while simultaneously providing a full-service menu to hundreds of other species and producing offspring who exhibit another set of superpowers.
Similar to amphibians who give birth to babies fully capable of self-transport and self-feeding, mangrove parents produce viviparous seeds that germinate while still on the tree, pop off into the water, and float as long they need to, often setting up shop thousands of kilometers from home. To establish themselves, the seedlings settle into the mud and begin growing simultaneously in all directions, a trick known as gravitropism.
Instead of being positively gravitropic (following gravity) and simply tucking their downward-growing roots underground like other plants, mangroves make rooting an acrobatic act. Mangroves grow aerial roots at their waists that extend horizontally, or diagravitropically (perpendicular to gravity) before curving down into the muck; roots exhibiting negative gravitropism (growing against gravity) that poke vertically back up through the soil surface, and orthogravitropic roots that grow up and down.
Clusters of these curvaceous, aboveground complexes of stilt, prop, or buttress roots make it look as if mangroves could hitch up their woody skirts and hike off into the sunset – that is, if their roots weren’t so thoroughly mangle-tangled up with one another.
It took biologists years of microscope-gazing to figure out the following: mangroves filter salt through their roots, excrete salt through their leaves or bark, or bundle salt crystals and dump them into older, dying leaves. Certain salt-excluding species are so good at what they do, we can cut open their roots and suck fresh water out, even though the entire plant is submerged in saline water or soil.
If we lean in close and carefully examine mangrove stilt roots, running our hands along their dark surfaces (and scaring away a few crabs or mudskippers), our fingertips bump into circular “pores” (lenticels) in the bark. Lenticels suck air into the aboveground roots, store it in specialized pockets (arenchyma), and redistribute oxygen into submerged roots where conditions are anerobic and depending on the substrate, quite toxic. Other mangrove species convert toxins into harmless compounds.
Mangroves grow another set of roots – spiky daggers called pneumatophores (literally, breathing tubes) – thrusting skyward through the mud with wild abandon. My last mangrove stroll in an otherwise pillowy sea bed – with softly swirling silt perfect for digging your toes in – involved cursing in four languages while high-stepping through a maze of sharply jutting, steely snorkel-roots, many of them hiding just beneath the water’s surface.
Still, I admire mangroves. Superior to any here-today-gone-tomorrow strip mall, mangroves serve as nurseries, hunting grounds, supermarkets, apothecaries, and hardware stores. Interconnecting mangrove roots trap organic detritus that feeds other microscopic life (like plankton), which feeds everyone else. They host hundreds of intertidal species: algae, alligators, barnacles, birds, bryzoans, clams, crabs, crinoids, crocodiles, deer, dolphins, dugong, echinoderms, epiphytes, fish, fungi, hydrozoans[i], lobsters, manatees, monkeys, mudskippers, oysters, rays, sea stars, shrimps, snakes, sponges, and tigers.
Mangroves provide edible fruit, tannic bark used in traditional medicines and handicrafts, and timber for local communities. Tragically, in most countries, mangroves are the forgotten stepchild, so under-appreciated they’ve become one of our most highly endangered forest systems, primarily because we crave cheap frozen shrimp. Shrimp farmed from temporary, highly polluting ponds carved out of former mangrove forests.
Silly us.
I fell headfirst in love with mudskippers on a small island off the northern tip of Sulawesi. Diving along coral atolls in the region revealed a dazzling array of so much fantabulously tentacled, budding, iridescent, and thoroughly intertwined marine life packed into every square centimeter it was hard to keep my eyes in my head and the scuba regulator in my mouth. When we anchored I was eager to continue the adrenaline rush of discovery, so I stepped off our chartered boat for a mid-day stroll across a stretch of mudflats.
It was one of those “only mad dogs and Englishmen” interludes: an afternoon of oppressive, unrelenting baking without a hint of shade. A time when ship crews nap and itchy EuroAmericans explore with a compulsion bemoaned by my tribal aunties: “o, rebau hau ga, lako leso bau ga” – there you go again, walking in the heat of the sun.
At low tide the tannish-grey sand sparkled in a mirage-inducing sheen, covered by a band of seawater while appearing otherwise featureless. Still, the dullness beckoned – with a call heard throughout the ages by truly manic investigators – and off I trotted.
Stepping onto the flats, I sloshed through the shallows. Once the gently lapping waters around my ankles settled into a looking-glass surface, the curtains parted, the angels sang hallelujah, and a new set of kingdoms dissolved into view.
The uniform background highlighted each sighting: living jewels poised above a velvety cushion. Brilliant sapphire juvenile eels writhed underfoot, finely articulated crabs scampered into holes. Tiny striped pipefish, exquisitely slender relatives of the seahorse, darted amongst swaying blades of jade green sea grass. I forgot the heat, forgot the time, and almost forgot where I was, transfixed by prismatic life in a liquid metropolis masquerading as an empty stretch of sand.
I made my acquaintance with the Skippers of Mud entirely by surprise that day, sometime after reluctantly prying myself away from the ever-seductive pipefish. Wandering off to the mangrove-fringed portion of the flats, as I drew closer, I heard and felt a rapid series of tiny splatters. Rapidly scanning the scene, I could only see clusters of roots. Nothing with claws, pads, or feet.
The sun beat down, creating a wavy mirage effect. Wondering if I could hallucinate sound, I stepped forward again, terribly curious. More splatters, flickers of movement. Squealing with recognition, I yelled “mudskippers!!!” and executed a few hop-leaps of my own, spurring another cotillion of the critters into hiding. Oops.
The rest of that afternoon was spent in a game of go-seek-and-hide, with the human doing all the seeking, and the mudskippers excelling in hiding. I was delighted and intrigued by these Lilliputian super-creatures whom I had heard so much about, but never witnessed in the wild. In retrospect, not even sightings of the charismatic Big Five – lion, elephant, rhino, leopard, and buffalo – on African tours produced the same thrill. These minuscule, slippery descendants of our collective ancestral beginnings inspired a profoundly sweet awe.
A decade after the Sulawesi mudflats I rediscovered mudskippers beneath my Balinese diving dock. Three cliques (families?) perched in tidal goop, glistening sides heaving in and out, eyeballs gyrating: mudskipper soap operas.
The script was predictable – boys being boys – but the execution otherworldly. Abruptly deciding their territorial boundaries needed defending, a few mudskipper bullies puffed up their chests, rolled their buggy eyes, and in a whir of motion, madly flick-hop-hopped after their rivals.
Up the pneumataphoric roots, down the pneumataphoric roots, around the pneumataphoric roots, across the slick sand, two males wildly skittering around in an alien mudwrestling contest where none of the contestants had arms or legs, just microscopic fins.
Quietly punching the record button on my digital camera, I captured a few territorial dances, chuckling soundlessly as the action-packed mudskipper drama unfolded. Hours passed, clouds drifted by, the resident kingfisher called out his authority, and finally my stomach grumblings were too insistent to ignore.
Hauling myself up into a sitting position and spooking the dockside mudskippers into invisibility again, I gave them one final salute, and flip-flopped my way back across creaking deck boards in search of lunch, grinning and hugging my camera with its precious footage tightly to my side.
The Skippers of Mud ruled the day, once again.
[i] Crinoids are multi-armed, tube-footed sea animals resembling fans, feathers, and stars. Echinoderms are spiny creatures like sea urchins. Bryozoans are microorganisms with calcium carbonate or mucilaginous skeletons growing in colonies. Hydrozoans are a type of jellyfish.
This essay was first published in Awake in the World, Volume 2 (Riverfeet Press 2019).