Our visit to Santa Cruz Island offers us some of the best opportunities to show our visitors some interesting plants. The littoral or Coastal Zone, which occupies a very narrow area close to the shoreline, is the first vegetation zone seen in the trail that leads to the Charles Darwin Research Station. Plants that live in this zone must be capable of surviving in a salt-rich environment that may be covered with water during certain periods of the day, but exposed at others. Due to this special situation, plants, for instance mangroves, have developed adaptations that allow them to survive in such hard conditions. In Galapagos we find four species of mangroves:
The button mangrove (Conocarpus erectus) shown today is easily recognized due to the fact that it has thinner and smaller leaves than other Galapagos mangroves. This plant is an evergreen shrub that is 9 to 21 feet tall. It is the least widespread of the mangroves found on the archipelago, thus the least seen and known. Its genus Latin name, Conocarpus (cone-shaped fruit), comes from the Greek konos= cone, and, carpos= fruit. Name that perfectly describes its most notorious characteristic: its fruits. The button mangrove has conspicuous beautiful reddish brown drupelike fruits, flattened and thinly incrusted into a spherical cone. The cones resemble globular buttons, like the ones found in some good-quality clothing.
