>> [ Laughing ] You can see -- So this is a little American alligator.

It's not a crocodile.

Okay, here we go.

Here's a couple more.

In fact, one of them just flew.

I've got something really neat in this bin I want to show you.

But I'm gonna throw some gloves on, and you'll see what I mean as soon as I put them on.

This animal is called a softshell turtle.

And, specifically, it's called a Florida softshell turtle.

And this is really an interesting-looking one.

It's got some pigment abnormalities.

Normally, they're not blotched and don't have light spots like this.

But this is a magnificent animal that is beautifully designed for what it does.

He gets the name softshell turtle because he doesn't have a hard shell like other turtles.

In fact, it's very much like leather, but very flexible shell compared to other turtles.

It's a strong swimmer.

You can tell by those webbed feet.

Long nose, obviously, for sticking his nose up so he can breathe.

Softshell turtles spend a lot of their time under the mud or under the sand.

And they snake their long neck up to the surface, and they breathe through that little snorkel on the end.

But that neck's also very, very important for something else.

These animals are predators.

They're extremely good at catching fish and crayfish and other small animals.

They have strong jaws and long necks that they can fire out and just snap things right up.

Let's look at some other LowCountry animals and look at how they find food.

You can catch some really cool things under cover.

So I've placed some sheets of plywood all around this pond.

Here's one to flip right here.

This is an eastern king snake.

This is one of my absolute favorite snakes.

In fact, one of my fondest memories as a child, my dad and I caught a king snake like this.

And I was holding it up by the tail just admiring how pretty it was, and it threw up a three-and-a-half-foot fully intact canebrake rattlesnake.

So these things kill and eat other snakes, including venomous species.

In fact, they can get a copperhead, a rattlesnake, or other pit viper, and they're immune to the bite of it.

On another occasion, I picked up a king snake like this when I was in college, I was holding it by the tail, and it threw up 12 turtle eggs.

The neatest thing about that story is I was able to incubate those things and hatch them.

So, apparently, that king snake had eaten them just minutes before I picked it up.

Actually, I have lots of snake throw-up stories, but we'll probably save those for another show.

So king snakes are snake-eaters.

I mean, they're beautifully designed for eating other snakes.

They're powerful constrictors, so if they find a snake they want to eat, they'll grab it by the head, they'll wrap it up with their body, and they'll squeeze it.

And then when it asphyxiates, they can swallow it whole.

Snakes can stretch -- their head and neck and mouth can stretch open very, very wide.

So that allows a snake to swallow things that are twice the width of its head or bigger.

So if you look at a snake, I mean, the whole body is elongated and the internal organs are elongated as well -- especially the lung and the stomach.

And so they can eat very long things and huge meals.

So because of that, snakes don't need to eat very often.

If this guy eats another snake about two-thirds of his size, he doesn't have to eat for a long time -- weeks and maybe even months.

Now, king snakes don't just eat turtle eggs and venomous snakes.

In fact, they'll eat just about anything.

They're true generalists.

I've seen king snakes eat bird eggs, I've seen them eat other snakes -- venomous and nonvenomous -- I've seen them eat frogs.

Just about anything that moves and is small enough for them to grab and swallow, they will.

Now, king snakes are nonvenomous.

We can just glance at this snake and you notice this guy has a relatively narrow head.

If this was a pit viper, like a copperhead or a cottonmouth, it would have a big, wide, triangular head.

Now, king snakes are active in any warm month of the year.

Sometimes they're out at night, but more often, they're out during the morning or the afternoon.

And these guys may be crawling around using their tongue to pick up little chemical signals that there's food nearby.

They're also pretty good burrowers, so they'll go into a rodent burrow or something like that to chase food as well.

I'm gonna put this guy back right where we got him.

You know, not all predators live in remote parts of the world.

Some of them live in your neighborhood, in your own community.

And this is a good example.

I've been seeing these little holes.

And one of the things I used to do as a kid is I would take a piece of grass like this, and I would push it down in the hole... and then I would just wait for a minute.

And if you give it just a minute, it'll start to jiggle just a little bit.

And after it starts to jiggle, sometimes it will even rise back out of the hole.

So let's see what this thing's gonna do.

And you see this one's moving.

So now that I know this guy has bitten the stem and he's starting to push it up out of the hole, I'm going to try to snatch it out very, very quickly.

And there you go, he's on the ground right here, crawling.

And so we can get a good look at it.

So this guy lives underground.

In fact, the larvae spend their whole lives in these perfectly vertical burrows.

And you can imagine what a job it is to dig a burrow this deep.

And that's where he lives pretty much his entire life until it's time to metamorphose.

And he metamorphoses into this beautiful little beetle called the tiger beetle.

And tiger beetles come in a variety of shades and colors.

Some of them are bright green with spots, some of them, like the one I think this species is, which is a big-headed tiger beetle, has all kinds of colors.

And the reason why I think it's one of those is I found a couple shells, elytra, the outer covering of a couple of these big-headed tiger beetles.

So here is this larva.

I mean, amazing jaws.

And this guy has pinched me a couple times.

Now, it doesn't really hurt that bad, but it is a pretty good pinch for such a small animal.

This looks a little bit like a caterpillar with this big head and massive jaws.

Now, this is a predator -- both as a larva and as an adult.

These things are predators.

They feed on all sorts of small insects and small animals.

And then when it's time to mate, the animals will fly and then mate.

They, of course, lay eggs and produce more of these tiger beetle larvae, which grow up to be beetles.

Okay, obviously, we snatched this guy right out of his burrow, so we want to put him back in.

And I'm gonna see if he'll crawl right back down into this burrow.

So I was walking around the edge of this field flipping logs and things over, and I found something really, really neat.

He's right on the edge of this log right here.

If you look right here, let me see if I can uncover him.

Boy, he is hard to catch.

And this is a really cool animal.

This is a shrew.

And it's a leaf shrew.

Now, he's got a pretty good bite on my gloves.

There's a reason I'm wearing gloves, 'cause these guys have a very impressive bite.

And leaf shrews are one of the smallest mammals in the world.

And one of the really cool things about shrews is many species are venomous.

They have venomous saliva.

So -- and nobody knows exactly why this is, but one really good theory is that shrews can bite a big grasshopper or an earthworm or even a frog or a snake or a lizard and paralyze it, and that keeps the food fresh.

Shrews have a real problem.

They have an incredibly high metabolism.

Their heart may be a thousand times per minute.

They have to eat probably their body weight or more every single day.

And some species, probably even more than that.

So finding food is a full-time job.

They probably spend the majority of their time looking for food.

Now, this animal is not a rodent, it's an insectivore, but very different than voles and mice, for instance.

Very, very different animals.

This is a fascinating little creature, but I'm gonna go ahead and let him go.

The ground is littered with these little, tiny pits.

And these pits are actually evidence of one of our really common insects.

So I think I'm gonna dig one of these up.

First of all, I'm gonna see if somebody's in there.

And sure enough.

So I'm gonna dig one of these things up.

And sift through the sand.

And there he is.

So this is an antlion.

And an antlion is the larva of a Neuroptera.

The adult actually looks like a dragonfly, a very slow-flying dragonfly.

But the larva is really cool.

It's a major predator.

And these little larvae dig pits, and they go backwards.

Some people call these doodle bugs, and they go backwards round and round in a circle until they make these wonderful pits that they use to trap ants and other small insects.

So if an ant falls in the pit, he will do all sorts of cool things, like try and snap it with his jaws.

He'll agitate the sand so it slides down, knocking the ant down to the bottom of the pit.

I mean, it's a really impressive tool for catching food, if you think about it.

So if you look at one of these antlions, they're all jaws.

Actually, they've got a pretty big abdomen, but huge jaws!

And that's what they use to grab those ants with.

Now, once this larva gets big enough, it will metamorphose into the adult.

And the adults probably don't live nearly as long as the larvae do.

I'm gonna put this guy down and see if he'll dig another burrow.

You know, antlions aren't the only animals that set traps for unwary victims.

Spiders have some unbelievable methods for capturing their prey.

The golden silk spider is one of our biggest spiders.

They get huge.

I mean, they can be three inches or more across.

Golden silk spiders belong to a group called orb-weavers.

And this is a huge group, and there's a lot of different sizes and shapes to these spiders.

And they make very different types of webs.

The female golden silk spider never leaves the web.

I mean, her web may be six feet across or more, and she stays in that web her entire life.

Now, she may repair that web every couple of nights, and that's because big animals may walk through it or a bird may damage it.

And if she catches lots of food, she has to repair it periodically.

So when an insect sticks in the web, hits one of the sticky portions of the web, the female can feel it through the strands through her body.

And she'll race down, and she has the ability to walk on non-sticky portions of the web.

She knows where they are.

She races down, grabs her prey, bites it, and when she does, she injects venom into it.

This venom does a couple things.

It immobilizes the prey, and it also starts the digestive process.

Now, she may eat it right away or she may wrap it up and store it for later if she's not hungry.

And the way they do this is they produce silk from their spinnerets, and they will wrap it with their feet and then put a layer of silk around the outside of the body.

And this literally immobilizes the animal and keeps it from escaping from the web.

Golden silk spiders eat all kinds of flying insects.

They eat moths and butterflies and dragonflies and grasshoppers and all sorts of things.

But occasionally, they'll even eat things -- small vertebrates like little lizards and even tree frogs.

You know, golden silk spiders are major predators.

But you realize this is just one of thousands of different kinds of spiders that live in the LowCountry.

There's a skimmer.

A lot of tadpoles in here.

We may have -- oh, those two just split up.

Oh, man!

Oh, man, I missed.

Hit the water.

I have a tendency to swing a little -- a little... Got him.

Now, look at -- this is a predator.

This is a dragonfly, a green darner.

And green darners are one of our biggest dragonflies.

And green darners get their name, like the other darners, because their abdomen is long and slender, kind of like a darning needle.

The first thing you notice about this guy is how big the eyes are.

They have huge eyes and tremendous vision.

These things feed on the wing, and they're also fast fliers.

So they can chase things down in the air, grab it, and sometimes they're even feeding on it while they're flying -- deer flies, mosquitoes, and all sorts of other things.

This appears to be a male.

You can tell by that real vivid color.

The female is a little bit more drab-colored.

This animal belongs to a group called odonates.

And odonates include dragonflies and damselflies, and they're characterized by four wings, and they always have these venation that you see in the wings right here.

They're predators at this stage.

But when they're most impressive is when they're larvae, when they live in the water.

I'll bit if we dip-net around here, we can find some of these.

Let me grab my dip net.

Oh, here's something.

And you can see him kind of running around the net here.

let me see if I can pull him out carefully.

And this particular one is a scavenger diving beetle.

And these guys feed -- they will catch things and feed on it, but they also will eat on dead and decaying things as well.

These guys start in the water are larvae, and when the larvae get big enough, they metamorphose into these adult beetles.

So both the larvae and the adults live in the water for their entire lives.

Now, these things must fly to mate, so a lot of times you'll see them streetlights and all sorts of things like that.

But this is not what we're looking for.

Lots of tadpoles.

Okay, there's a couple dragonfly nymphs in here, but here is the one we're looking for.

That is an immature dragonfly.

Looks like one of the darners.

And this is how they start out.

Eggs are laid in the water.

The eggs hatch into little larvae, the larvae get bigger and bigger until they metamorphose and turn into adult dragonflies.

But they live most of their lives in the water, so they may be in the water for several months or sometimes longer than a year.

As larvae, these things are major predators as well.

And they have some kind of neat things going for them.

Actually, they have sort of water-propulsion so they can move about by firing water out of their bodies.

And also, they have very impressive mouth parts.

And I'm going to see if I can pull this guy's mouth parts out so we can see them.

This guy can fire this apparatus out and capture all kinds of small animals and pull them back to his mouth parts where he can feed on them.

Although this is an insect, this animal has gills.

So let's get it back in the water.

The salt marsh is a pretty tough place to make a living.

But there's a lot of food here if you can figure out how to catch it and eat it.

[ Motor whirring ] Crabs are absolutely incredible predators.

So we set a couple traps out here and there's a couple species that I want to catch.

Let's see if we did.

So here's our trap.

You see we've got a yellow float on it.

And that designates that this is a recreational crab trap.

And with my South Carolina fishing license, I can have two traps like this.

But they have to be marked with this yellow ball.

So it looks like we got a whole bunch of stuff in here.

Lots of crabs!

And we have two different species.

We have blue crabs, and then we also have stone crabs.

So let's get a look at a couple of these up close.

And I'm just gonna pull one of these out at a time.

Ha ha!

This guy -- I don't think I need to tell anybody, crabs can pinch really, really hard.

So I'm gonna try one at a time.

I'm gonna get this one out first.

All right, here is a big male, a jimmy.

I can tell it's a male because of that vertical -- looks kind of like a rocket ship here.

A female would have a apron that was much wider and much broader right here.

But blue crabs are incredible predators.

This particular crab has two types of claws, one that's more for crushing -- even things like bivalves and things, small bivalves.

And then he has another one that's more designed for shredding and tearing things apart into smaller pieces for feeding.

Of course, they transfer things to the mouth parts, and that's how they can ingest them.

But I'll tell you what, if I was a small animal living in the salt marsh, if I was a little tiny animal, this is probably the thing I'd be most scared of.

These are voracious predators.

One of my favorite stories was told to me by Chris Marsh.

And he told me that he saw a blue crab shaking a piece of spartina grass, and he was shaking it because there was a little periwinkle snail that was perched precariously on the top of it.

And so that crab was literally trying to shake the snail off where he could catch it, it would land in the water, and he could eat it.

Now, we're going to let all these guys go, but if you do keep a blue crab, they have to be five inches from point to point, which is about the length of a soda can.

Okay, another neat crab that's in here, and I have to be really careful with this guy, is a stone crab.

And look at the build on this dude -- huge claws!

And this is very different than that blue crab.

That blue crab is one of the swimming crabs.

It's a powerful swimmer, it can come up to the surface.

This guy is gonna just lumber around on the bottom.

In fact, they're always associated with structure -- oyster reefs, docks, things like that, 'cause that's where they live.

They feed on bivalves, things like clams and oysters, which they can literally crush with these claws.

Now, a lot of people eat stone crabs, but you don't eat the whole crab like a blue crab.

You eat just one claw, the bigger of the two claws, and it has to be two and three-quarters inches on this fixed, lower claw.

And what you do is break the claw off very carefully, and then this guy will grow a new claw back.

It's really an amazing fishery when you think about it.

These guys have the ability to regenerate claws, and therefore, if you eat the claw, a new one will grow back.

I want to show you one more really cool thing on this trap.

Now, this trap has what's called a terrapin excluder device.

Diamondback terrapins live in the marsh, and this terrapin excluder device allows this trap to catch crabs but at the same time, it's gonna keep especially large-sized diamondback terrapins from getting accidentally caught in the traps.

We've gotten a good look at some crabs, so I'm gonna go ahead and dump these guys back in.

Saltwater impoundments like this are loaded with life.

The marsh is just on the other side of this rice trunk, and so a lot of marsh creatures end up in this pond.

And of all the species that we're talking about, shrimp are probably the one that is most universally delicious.

Everybody eats shrimp.

In fact, in some cases, shrimp will even eat shrimp.

So I've got a great big cast net here, and we're gonna throw it and see if we can catch a couple and get a good close look at them.

All right, we're gonna pitch this thing right out here and see what's here.

That mostly opened up.

Let it sink a little bit.

Yeah, I feel something in it.

There's lots in this net.

Oh, look at the -- So lots of shrimp.

Okay, now we obviously don't want to deal with all of these, so I'm going to shake several of these out.

And we're gonna push most of these back in the water.

I'm going to get several.

All right, I'm getting these in as quick as I can.

Boy, you see them just blast -- shrimp are good jumpers.

I'm gonna reach in here and grab one of these shrimp.

And the first thing we're gonna do is decide what species these are.

And they are white shrimp.

There's a couple ways I can tell.

One is it's just kind of a light color.

It's not white, but they're very, very light.

The other thing that -- well, there are a couple of other things, but one of the things specifically is look how long these antennae are.

White shrimp have very long antennae.

They're, you know, up to twice the length of the body.

And then the other things, if I look at the tail, it's got some black and some blue on it.

And other species of shrimp, like the brown shrimp and the pink shrimp, have different-colored tails.

But this is really kind of an amazing animal when you think about it.

And when you talk about form and function, this animal is designed beautifully.

This thing has swimming legs and then it also has these feet for walking.

And these swimming legs propel it through the water, and they can swim forward.

But the way they really escape from things is they take this tail, and they scoop it underneath very rapidly.

And this moves them forward very, very quickly.

In some cases, it will blast them completely out of the water, and you guys have probably seen shrimp just fly right out of the water.

That's how they're doing it.

They're scooping underneath and firing their body out.

But there is something else.

It's right here.

This is called a rostrum.

And that rostrum is really sharp.

And many times when I've caught shrimp to eat, I've poked myself on this rostrum, and it really, really hurts.

So if a fish or another predator grabs a shrimp, it's gotta deal with this spear on the end of the head.

You know, shrimp get eaten by a lot of things, but they have to eat, themselves.

And they eat a lot of really small particles, little pieces of fish, little pieces of plant material, and things like that that they glean off the bottom.

So shrimp have some pretty good ways to protect themselves.

But the biggest key is a female shrimp will lay have a million to a million eggs.

Produce a lot of babies.

Some of them are gonna get eaten, but some of them are gonna make it.

All right, let's get these guys back in the marsh.

I thought you guys might like to see another type of shrimp that we caught earlier.

It's in a bucket right here.

This is actually not a shrimp at all, but a stomatopod, which is kind of a different type of animal.

So this is a mantis shrimp.

In fact, it's called a stomatopod -- Got me.

These things have spikes.

They have these incredible front appendages, very much like a praying mantis.

In fact, that's where they get the name mantis shrimp is because they fire those things out.

And I'm gonna see if can pick him up again.

But you have to be careful.

I'm being very careful of the front end, but you also gotta watch the back end, too, 'cause their tail has sort of spike on it.

So let me try this again.

Okay, I think if I hold him with these pincers like this, I just want you to look at the appendages on the front!

And you can see where he gets the name mantis shrimp because not only do these things have razor-sharp ends, but also they have spines all along the length of them.

So this is one of the spearers.

When you talk about stomatopods, you talk about smashers and you talk about spearers.

This particular one fires those claws out and sticks them in the side of a fish or a small crustacean and then hooks it and brings it back to the mouth parts.

This is one of the fastest movements in the animal kingdom.

This has been compared -- I've heard it said that it's 50 times faster than the blink of an eye.

As I said, this animal is covered with spines.

There are spines on the tail, there's spines on the front appendages.

I'm actually kind of scared of these guys, so I'm trying to figure out a way to hold on to it without getting stuck.

These guys have incredible vision, which helps them to key in on their prey and nail it.

Now, I've heard these things called finger-poppers and thumb-slitters, and, believe me, I can see why.

We've seen some great examples of how LowCountry animals find and catch their food.

But, remember, this is just a small fraction of the animals that share our lands and waters.

If you want to see some incredible creatures like this, you gotta get out in the field and experience them for yourself.

Thanks for joining us on "Coastal Kingdom."