What the water hyacinth is to freshwater bodies, Ipomoea-pes-caprae is to the seashore, a spectacularly successful species that literally carpets, in gushing green, the shorelines of Andhra Pradesh; this despite the hyper-saline environment, the deadening desiccation and the burning sand into which it plunges its roots, both species capable of overcoming the inclement elements with almost anti- climactic ease.
While the water hyacinth is not particularly pretty and pleasant of sight, marring as it does the beauty of inland lacustrine waters and rivers, the same cannot be said of the Goat’s Foot - the alias of Ipomoea - that redeems itself by the sheer lavender beauty of its flowers,the trumpet-shaped inflorescence trumpeting, as it were, the evolutionary success of the sprawling species that literally stitches the loose sands together with its underground roots preventing the denudation of the dune sands.
The pale green leaves are surprisingly fat and fleshy - not the paper-thin paper towels that are the leaves of inland species!! - and have an indentation at their apices on the mid-line, dividing the leaf into twin lobes that resembles a cloven hoof -hence the alias.
Note the upward pointing habitus of the leaves, this presumably to shield them from the hot heat of the burning sands. What is truly remarkable is that the physiologic function of both the indentation and the fleshiness remain unexplained.The former might be to break the wind force and prevent the leaf from being bent over and onto the burning sands - the charred curled black remains of the dead leaves in the photos are dramatic testimony that leaves here are”burnt” long before they have a chance to decay.
The fleshy character of the leaf might be to prevent desiccation much as desert species of plant too are fleshy for the same reason. Cacti are found on the seashores here for a reason - the littoral is a desert despite the adjacent massive moving mass of marine water.
Yarada beach, Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, March 1, 2020.
