How Mangroves Story: On Being a Filter Feeder

Abstract

The relationship between gravity, the moon and the ocean translates into the regular rhythm of tides, which provide a powerful energy, both productive and destructive, across intertidal zones. Mangroves, like other intertidal ecologies, negotiate the regularities and disturbances of tidal energies through many processes and build up complex worlds. One of these processes is filter feeding, which transforms incoming detritus into many kinds of bodies, while mucus covered faeces are excreted into the bacterial-rich mud, to be transformed again. Filter feeding stories the relationship between the moon and the sea into thick embodied mangrove narratives. This paper demonstrates and explores an account of relationality as narrative within a semiotic material ontology, as told in the storying of the relationship of the moon and the sea within the materiality of mangroves.