The word "mangroves" refers to a special community of plants and animals occurring in tropical areas that are inundated permanently or occasionally with saltwater. Mangrove communities occur intermittently along all the Yucatan's coasts and surrounding islands. Few of the Earth's ecosystems are as rich in species and numbers of living things, and few are as important to the broader ecological community as mangroves. The young of many ocean fish species spend their early days in the mangroves, so mangroves are very important to offshore fishing.
However, mangroves are also very fragile. They are vulnerable to hurricanes, human drainage programs and general "development." In fact two of the Yucatan's main woody mangrove species -- Red Mangrove and Black Mangrove -- are regarded as threatened.
Coastal mangrove communities occur in the tropics worldwide, but the species composition of the communities changes from region to region. In the Yucatan usually we think of four different woody species as constituting our mangrove swamps. Sometimes it's observed that, in terms of water depth and salinity, the four species arrange themselves like this:
(deepest water & saltiest soil) (driest & least salty)
Red Mangrove -> Black Mangrove ->White Mangrove -> Buttonwood