Look close at these red mangroves crowding the water on both sides of you, standing up out of the salt on those wild, arching, tangled roots — because they may be the most important, and most underappreciated, trees in all of Florida. Folks call them the walking trees, for the way those roots stride out into the water like a hundred bent legs — and there's truth in the name, because a mangrove is a tree that BUILDS land. Its roots catch the drifting silt and leaves and shells and hold them, and slowly, over the years, the mud piles up, the water shallows, and a new little island is born right where there was only sea. This whole refuge, these very keys you're driving through, were grown that way — tree by patient tree.
And those flooded roots are one of the great nurseries of the sea: baby fish, shrimp, crabs, the whole young generation of the gulf, hiding and growing up safe in that tangle where the big predators can't follow. No mangroves, no fish; no fish, no birds; no birds, no Ding Darling. It all starts with these humble, salt-drinking, mud-making trees. They don't look like much. They're holding up the whole living world out here.
Photo: Steve Hillebrand, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service · Public domain
