SALICORNIA

These mangrove swamps fill with salty water at high tide. In fact, there's a large array of evaporation and salt-crystallizing ponds not far to the east, near the town of Las Coloradas, where the Maya have been producing salt for thousands of years.

It's not surprising, then, that some unique-looking plants are found here highly adapted to salty conditions. One of them, a 15-inch high clump of which I pass daily on my morning walks, looks like a big cluster of many- jointed, slender, green, upward-pointed fingers, as shown at the right.

The plant is SALICORNIA BIGELOVII, sometimes called "glasswort" and sometimes "pickleweed." Pickleweed is a good name because the plant is succulent as a pickle from a jar, and salty-tasting. I just call them salicornias, their scientific name derived from Greek roots meaning "salt-horn," the "horn" being the skin, which can be salty when you lick it.

This plant looks like it's all stem. Its leaves have been reduced to sheathes that don't look leaflike at all, and its tiny flowers remain sunken in the fleshy stem-joints. When you see the swollen stems you can't avoid thinking of the fingers of someone with water-retention problems, who has slipped up and eaten too much salt. Both plants and animals apparently have to deal with a basic fact for living things on Earth: If salt builds up in your system, your body has to gorge itself with water to deal with it.

Salicornias are now placed in the Amaranth Family, which makes sense when you remember that both salicornias and amaranths produce tiny flowers, the ovaries of which generally possess only one compartment producing a single seed.