Useful palm!
The coconut palm is used in a variety of ways: The meat of the coconut is eaten, the milk is drunk and even the buds can be processed and then make a delicious vegetable. The rest of the nut is also processed and the wood is used for building ships and houses. Incidentally, none of the coconut trees in the Maldives is privately owned, they all belong to the state.
What is growing in the Maldives?
There are few different plants in the Maldives. Around 600 plant species have been counted, but only 100 to 150 of them can survive without human protection. Most of the plants are not originally from the region, but were introduced. Therefore, they cannot adapt in the same way as the native plants and are much more sensitive.
The native plants include the pandanus trees, which are screw trees. It has roots that don’t go very deep. That would be dangerous, then you could come across salt water very quickly and very few land plants like that. The most important for the people are the coconut palms, they provide the livelihood for many people in the Maldives.
What is living there?
According to 800zipcodes, dangerous animals hardly live in the Maldives. What you get to see again and again, however, are the geckos, which you also like to find in rooms. They eat insects and the more geckos in the room, the fewer insects. Of course, they also live in the wild, but their color is so well adapted that you can rarely see them there.
There are harmless species of snakes like blindworms and snakes as well as one or the other frog. On the tourist islands you will have to look for snakes, these have at most a retreat on the uninhabited islands where they can hide.
Which birds live in the Maldives?
The bird world is a bit more diverse, there are over 100 different species, with the proportion of sea birds being the highest. You can find herons, seagulls and terns on the beaches. Many migratory birds such as buzzards or hawks stop in the Maldives and you can also spot a species of cuckoo or a small parrot on the islands.
There’s something going on underwater
As little as the fauna above the water is diverse, the more spectacular it is under water. Many tourists travel to the Maldives precisely because of this diversity of the underwater world. On the one hand there are the coral gardens, in which countless coral fish cavort.
Moray eels are very special fish, even if they don’t look like fish at all. There are many different types of them. They become up to three meters long and can move easily through the coral passages without injuring themselves, because the corals have extremely sharp edges that always pose a risk of injury.
Scorpion fish
The scorpion fish are colorful and beautiful to look at. They have poison in their spines that burns when touched. The scorpion fish include the lionfish, the scorpionfish and the stone fish. These can be great camouflage. They lie on the ground and can hardly be recognized, they adapt so well to their surroundings. This fish is really dangerous and you shouldn’t get too close to it.
Perch of all sizes and species are not dangerous, but can be found in abundance on the reefs. There is even one that can be up to three meters long and weigh 400 kilograms. By the way, Nemo, whom you may know from the cartoon, was also a perch, more precisely an anemonefish, but they belong to the group of perches – namely the damselfish. They are also known as the clown fish. They stay in the poisonous tentacles of the sea anemones, which they also protect.
But there are also much larger animal contemporaries in the waters of the Maldives. However, there are hardly any whales. If they should get lost there, they will disappear again quickly, because the water is too warm and much too shallow for them. But whales definitely live in the depths of the sea, but a diver will hardly see them.
Sharks also control the reefs. Usually these are nurse sharks or black tip sharks, which can be up to three meters long. The gray reef shark also appreciates it very much on the reefs. But the sharks are not dangerous to humans. To date, no one who has dived in the Maldives has been injured by a shark.
A very special animal is the manta, whose wingspan can be up to seven meters and which weighs as much as a car. It is not a predator and opens its big mouth in order to swallow as much plankton as possible, on which it feeds.
