The Daintree

The Daintree. Where the densest rainforest meets the Pacific coast. Stinger infested waters crashing up against miles of jagged rock and mangrove forests. What a great place!

We went to the beach on the first night at sunset... incredible patterns on the sand from the running of a freshwater stream back into the ocean. The very same stream, in fact, that we were urged to stay away from because of crocadiles. Wicked.
Here's a couple of fan palms... very large diversity of palms in the daintree. These whorled leaves are almost perfectly circular; really very neat. There are also a bunch of cycads here, which look a lot like palms, but are actually a form of tree that dinosaurs used to eat way back in the day. Their leaves are extremely tough in comparison to modern ones, and they look ancient.
A landsnail shell I found at the edge of the mangrove forest. They're actually really common, and a little bigger than a golf ball. This one was pretty nice though; very intact and clean.
A panorama of the mangrove beach. If you look closely, you can see them in the middle of the picture just boardering the ocean. They're the ones that are light green and closest to the ground.
The mangrove forest. They're not actually a species of tree, but a class of plant that have adapted to frequent flooding and high salinity soils. In order to cope with these conditions, thousands of species of plant have evolved stilted roots, even roots that grow down into the soil and then back up again like snorkels, in order for the trees to perform gas exchange with the air. The soil they grow in, which is often sandy, is so compacted that it's almost entirely anoxic; if they didn't have these specialized root structures, they'd drown. Similarly, they have to find ways to deal with the high salinity of their environment. There are a couple of common methods used by mangrove forests. First, reverse osmosis: they refuse to let any salt into their roots. Second: sequestration. They will sequester (store) the excess salt either in their bark, or in dummy leaves that fall to the ground when they're too full of salt. They're often leathery and yellow, and if you chew one it tastes... you guessed it... salty! Third: extrusion. Many mangrove trees have special glands on their leaves to push out the extra salt. They don't have to loose their leaves, but they do build up with a flaky, salty residue, which could affect their ability to collect sunlight. These strategies are common most everywhere that there is a dense forest in boggy or saline conditions, not just in Australia. This was my favorite part of the Daintree :)

Right then, I'll try to post some more soon, but I'm off to 40 Mile Scrub tomorrow morning to start my directed research project. I might be away from the internet for a few days.