---
title: Mangrove
scientific_name: 
common_name: Mangrove
published: 2024-11-19T18:41:51.573Z
updated: 2026-08-23T21:28:59.540Z
tags: Mangrove, Red Sea, Marine Life, Diving
url: https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/sea-plants/mangrove
---

# Mangrove

## Quick facts

- **Species listed here:** 1

## How to recognise this group

- dense thickets of woody plants
- thick, leathery green leaves, often with silvery undersides
- growing in shallow, sheltered muddy coastal areas

A mangrove is a tree standing in the sea. Nothing else with wood and leaves manages it. The trees at the seaward edge of a stand spend part of every day with their roots in salt water and the rest of it in mud with no oxygen in it, on a coast with no fresh water anywhere near. The salt is dealt with at the root and again at the leaf, and the roots send up shoots that break the surface to breathe, which leaves the other half of the problem: how a tree reproduces in a place where a dropped seed would rot or wash away before it did anything.

It barely uses seeds. The fruit germinates while it is still hanging on the branch, and what eventually falls is a live seedling with its root and first leaves already started. It floats, sometimes for weeks, carried on tides and currents until it grounds somewhere shallow enough to stand in, and then it anchors within days. A mangrove forest does not scatter seed and hope. It launches young trees.

What that founds is a structure rather than a plant. The root tangle takes the energy out of small waves and holds the mud they would otherwise carry off, so a stand slowly builds the ground it stands on. Inside it the water is shallow, cluttered and useless to anything large, which makes it the safest nursery on the coast, and juvenile fish that will later live out on the reef spend their first months in there. Leaves drop, get shredded, and the fragments feed the shallows around them.

Here it comes down to one species, Avicennia marina, growing at the limit of what is possible. With no rivers and almost no rain, the stands are small and low, confined to lagoons and the mouths of wadis where a little groundwater reaches the coast, and they thin out northward until the last of them stand on the Sinai shore. They are grazed as well: camels wade in to browse the leaves, which on a slow-growing stand in a place this dry is a real pressure rather than a curiosity.


## Species (1)

- [White Mangrove (Avicennia marina)](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/sea-plants/mangrove/white-mangrove)

---

*Source: [Red Sea Creatures](https://redseacreatures.com/taxon/sea-plants/mangrove)*
*Updated: August 23, 2026*