Daily Mud - A New Channel

Please forgive my temporary silence - not to be confused with bone-idleness. In actual fact the last two weeks have been very productive. Not only have I scampered into Malaysia for 12 minutes for the sake of a passport stamp, but also re-registered myself at Krabi Immigration and written up some of the masters research report. And as you will see from the map of the site, a whole new channel has been dug, with four new hills being produced, O, P, Q, R.

These hills have been made deliberately higher than before and added to on subsequent visits. All easy to type, but that has meant a lot of digging for yours truly. The reason for this channel was to help drain an area of standing water left at low tide. Saturated mud is hard for mangroves to grow in as root conditions are anaerobic all the time. This saturated, sloppy mud was also prone to wash off into the channels as the tide withdrew. So this wet mud has been scrapped off surrounding the channel and put up on the hills, creating a gentle slope into the new drainage channel.

The channel has been carefully shaped so it is wider at the bottom (south) near 'chaos corner' (named in honour of the European air traffic control hand-over point from western Europe to eastern) where it meets two other channels, and narrower at the top. And it curves like the resident snake, so as to be as natural a possible. Below is an earlier photo of the first third of this new channel being dug.

Chaos corner will be will be significantly widened and opened up.

Hill C continues to grow well. Now there is something to measure, 15 of the R. apiculata seedlings have been numbered, and their heights, leaf number and general condition measured. This will be tracked every month or so.

The tags are being monitored carefully to make sure they do not damage the plant. In case they do, labels have also been stuck into the mud next to the plant, if the tags need to be removed. 5 plants have been chosen at random from lower down on the hill, 5 at mid height and 5 on top to see if there is a difference.[A small prize for correctly guessing what the tags and labels have been made from.] Next project is to widen the pre-existing channel that runs from chaos corner in the middle, west to the sluice gate. Below is what it looks like at the moment. More news has this happens.