Mangrove Grass (Sea Billy-Goat Grass)

Mangrove grass (Aeluropus lagopoides, called lumb or khar on the coast) is the creeping turf grass that greens bare salt-flats nothing else will hold. It is a low, stoloniferous halophyte that spreads a dense saline-tolerant mat across the tidal fringes of the Sindh coast and the salt pans of the Balochistan highlands, grazed by camels and binding ground that is too salty for ordinary pasture.¹ Where the soil reads high on the salt meter, this is one of the few pioneers that will still cover it.

Where it thrives

This grass lives where salt rules. It is a C4 perennial of salt marshes, coastal and inland sabkha, damp saline flats, and bare ground near brackish springs — the kind of sites where little else grows.¹ It copes with that salt by a genuinely unusual route, excreting sodium from the leaf sheath and stem and shedding it as visible salt crystals, a mechanism that has made the grass a research model for salinity tolerance.² It dies back through the dry season and sprouts again after winter rain, and in Pakistan it runs from the coastal belt of Sindh and Balochistan inland to saline flats in Punjab.¹

Role in the system

Treat it as a saline-ground pioneer and living cover. Its real service is stabilisation: it binds sand and holds bare saline surfaces, and its creeping habit knits a continuous turf that shows strong potential for rehabilitating both inland and coastal salt flats.³ That cover matters most in the dry summer, when these habitats are otherwise stripped of vegetation — the grass keeps the surface protected and supplies forage in the very season feed runs short.³ On a coastal farm fighting salinity, it is the ground-stage step that makes later planting possible; for the wider sequence see our note on pioneer species for Sindh coastal salinity. Because it spreads by stolons rather than seed, you establish it by laying live runners onto damp saline ground rather than by sowing — a patch will close over and thicken on its own once it takes.

Grazing value

Mangrove grass produces useful fodder and is taken readily by camels and other stock.¹ Because it flourishes in the dry summer when surrounding flats carry no other green feed, it is a genuine lean-season forage rather than a bulk producer, and it is one of the more palatable forage grasses of that hot, dry window.³ Its salt tolerance also makes it a candidate for grazing turf and saline-land landscaping, putting otherwise idle salt ground to some use.¹

Cautions

This is a specialist, not an all-rounder. It belongs on saline and coastal ground; on good sweet soil it offers little a more productive grass would not beat. Forage off heavily salt-secreting plants is correspondingly salty, so it suits stock adapted to coastal grazing and works best as part of a mixed diet with browse and fresh water on hand. As a low, creeping turf it gives bulk feed only slowly, so lean on it for ground cover and lean-season grazing rather than as a main hay crop.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. “Aeluropus lagopoides.” Wikipedia.
2. Agarwal, P. K., et al. (2025). “Aeluropus lagopoides: an important halophyte with key physiological and molecular mechanisms for salinity tolerance and a unique genetic resource for developing climate resilient crops.” Journal of Plant Research.
3. Nisar, F., Gul, B., et al. (2023). “Phenotypic Plasticity Strategy of Aeluropus lagopoides Grass in Response to Heterogenous Saline Habitats.” Biology (MDPI) / PMC.