♪ (waves rumbling) ♪ ♪ >> Well, it's hard to believe all the animals lives that are represented by these shells you see on the beach.

It's very interesting.

>> Hello, I'm Beryl Dakers, and with me, of course, is Rudy Mancke, natural history curator for the South Carolina Museum Commission.

Beachcombing isn't really what you expect this time of year, but for some reason, this seems to be a pretty good time.

It's been very productive for us.

>> I think a couple of things really make it special this time, and that is that Hurricane David has recently visited this area, and the high winds caused high tides, and it's really churned up the beach and has caused a lot of death out there in the shallow ocean, as many of the animals out there were tossed ashore.

And of course, they could not survive.

And we'll see their bits and pieces, what's left of them anyway, today.

Probably all the soft parts are gone by now.

We may get lucky and find an animal at home, but usually you find leftovers like we found here.

>> Oh, and we found some beauties.

You know, I have been searching for sand dollars for ages, but usually you find bits and pieces, but this beach just seems to be strewn with intact sand dollars.

<Rudy> Well, the bottom was ripped up by the wave action.

And these animals live right on the surface of the sand under the water, and they get tossed up very quickly.

When they're alive, they're really more of a purplish brown color than this.

These are very dry and doesn't really give you the feeling for what the animal looked like when he was alive.

>> He must be a very tiny little animal, though, if he fits inside this.

>> Well, he's sort of compressed, yeah, like a pancake, fills those spaces.

The mouth, you know, is on the bottom here.

You can see the mouth opening there and little plates there, five of them inside to crush the food.

This animal feeds on mainly worms.

Some small shelled animals out there it also feeds on.

But this is related, you know, to the starfish.

You see any clues to that?

>> Sure, the design there.

>> The five parted design, the five holes here, and I picked up another left over of an animal called a sea urchin, which used to have some spines coming off.

They break off pretty quickly.

And this animal also, you can see five markings on the leftovers here.

>> He's related?

>> He's related.

<Rudy> It's the same group of animals.

You'll notice that the design comes in five parts.

And that's really typical of the animals that are called the Echinoderms, which means spiny-skinned animals.

They're the only group, large group, that's found exclusively in oceans, not on land and not in freshwater.

>> Does that mean that these are not seashells?

>> Oh no, they're not really seashells at all.

This is made out of almost the same material, but it's put together in quite a different way.

And again, the clue to the Echinoderm group is that it comes, it's body comes in five parts.

They're not found on land and not found in freshwater at all.

So they're kind of a special group -- <Beryl> -- Well, we're learning.

<Rudy> -- to meet, yeah.

>> Let's move on down by the water and see what we can find.

>> This is interesting because it's a little of the Mother Ocean.

It's left and trapped and there are many animals that are active down there.

If you look carefully, you can even see little hermit crabs crawling around on the bottom.

And one thing I think it's good to start off with today is that all of the animal life that we see could not exist at all without the plants.

We need to make that point over and over again.

The plankton out there in the ocean is what's responsible for most of the food that's produced in the ocean, but look right down here.

I think you can see, see the green seaweed, the algae that's very common in the ocean.

And you can really see it very distinctly here.

<Beryl> So they not only feed on each other, but they have a ready food supply there.

<Rudy> Yeah, and really all the energy for life comes from the sun.

And there are only a few living things, really, that can trap it, and almost all of them are the green plants.

And animals have to continue to kind of take it away from the plant material and use it for ourselves.

It's fun to play here.

Let's keep walking, though, and see what else we can see (ocean waves rumbling).

You know, sometimes it's hard on a beach this littered with shells to pick out good things.

>> (laughs) That's strange being really selective.

>> Yeah, this is one of the few times, but after storms is a perfect time.

Anybody who enjoys beachcombing gets on the beaches after the storms unquestionably.

Beryl, you know, the ocean, the beach area by the ocean, is a very dynamic place.

It's changing all the time and it's one of the exciting things about coming.

These trees here we're doing much better, you see, before Hurricane David.

I see a little green coming out from the base, but most of their life has been sapped away because of the high tide.

<Beryl> How can you tell, though, that that tree was alive that recently?

<Rudy> Well, I've been here a while, you know, not too long ago, and I've seen it.

But you see the green coming out right at the base there.

And that tells us that it's just beginning to sprout back.

It should have leaves all over it.

But they're all knocked off now by the storm.

Of course, you can see where the ocean has come in here, and look at it, even attacking the saltmarsh out in the distance.

I've got a nice thing here that we need to talk about.

Let's just walk a minute more and see what we can pick up, and then we can take a look at what we've got.

There's something that's interesting.

Here's something too that's kind of nice.

And here -- >> It's a stringy mass inside the shell.

>> All right, Beryl, let me ask you first, do you remember from an earlier show what kind of shell you picked up?

If my mother had picked that up, she'd have called it a conch shell.

It's not really a true conch.

>> No, this one is a channel whelk.

>> Exactly, the channeled whelk.

Those channels are very, very distinctive in the front edge there.

But the little things that you see inside that do look sort of odd are tubes produced by another animal, one of the worms.

And you see when these animals that lived in these shells die, the shell is not just tossed aside and never used again.

There are other animals that move in very, very quickly.

These animals like to find solid places to build their tubes.

The sand, which is shifting, is not the kind of place that you want to live on.

And so this shell is, in a sense, being recycled or reused by another variety of animal out in the ocean.

>> It's like nature's been recycling for a long time.

>> You know, a lot of people think that's something that we came up with a few years ago, it's not.

(laughs) Nature does that all the time.

We're all recycled material.

That's what's so magical about nature and life.

It continues to continue.

>> That is a beautiful shell!

>> On the show last time, we talked about scotch bonnets.

It's bonnet shaped, and it, of course, has the plaid, scotch plaid coloration.

State shell of North Carolina.

Remember, it feeds on Echinoderms, especially the sand dollars that we were looking at.

And so a lot of sand dollars.

You have a lot of these shells surviving.

This is the biggest one and the nicest one I've ever seen on the beaches of South Carolina.

And again, you see the colors.

They haven't been bleached.

This animal hasn't been on the beach long.

And that's why if you really like a lot of nice shells, you come after a good storm.

Look at this thing!

This is one of the mud crabs.

Some people call them stone crabs.

This is just the top part of the body.

>> It looks like pottery.

>> Yeah.

Look at this.

Here is this front leg.

It's modified a great deal.

And you see the size of that claw.

>> I don't think he's been dead too long (laughs).

>> It hadn't been dead terribly long.

No, but look at that thing.

It's called the stone crab, because it lives in stones, and it does have a very hard shell in the claw, and the flesh in there, before it decays, obviously, is edible.

>> Is that claw as powerful as it looks?

>> Extremely powerful.

Matter of fact, this animal feeds on young oysters, so it can actually put enough force on the tips there to crush oyster shells.

And that's a tremendous amount of force.

>> I don't think I'd want my finger to come in contact with them either.

The most common crab, let's just get down and look at these a second, because they're kind of interesting.

The most common crab, I think, to people in South Carolina, is the blue crab, probably because it's edible.

>> And because it has such a beautiful blue coloring.

>> Yeah, you can really see the blue on the front legs there.

And of course, these pincers are really nicely made to grab people.

They're protective devices, but the animal also gets food with it.

<Beryl> Those look like teeth.

<Rudy> Yeah, it does look it.

These things have sharp spines on the on the carapace here.

And you can actually tell whether these crabs are males or females pretty easily.

And we've got, I think, examples of both here.

Most probably female crabs usually get larger than the males, but you see the way the abdomen which folds up under the body is real broad and flat in the female.

And she, during the spring and summer, has a mass of eggs that she protects right here in this part of her abdomen.

See?

And that covers up over it.

The male on the other hand -- <Beryl> Well, he doesn't have a -- <Rudy> -- has an abdomen like this.

It's very, very skinny, narrow.

And, of course, it doesn't function as an egg storage device.

And so it's very easy to tell the difference in sexes of these animals on the beach.

But this is one of the crabs that is edible.

Two more whelks before we leave.

This one, you recall, I believe, is the most common whelk we've got.

And I'll just mention it quickly.

It has knobs.

Common name would be -- <Beryl> -- the knob whelk.

>> Knobbed whelk, right.

Very common in South Carolina.

And the other one here, which has an opening that is instead of being on the right side, on the left side of the body is the lightning whelk.

and these three whelks are very, very common in South Carolina, especially, again, after storms.

Let's see what else we can find further down the way.

>> Okay.

(footfalls) (shells crunching) >> It's from about this level down toward the beach that's nice, and when the tide's going out, of course, it's especially nice time to look because you've got more beach to to take to take a look at.

>> Rudy, what's that orange material?

>> The common name for it is sea pork, because it does look kind of porky and it does come from the ocean, but it's a colony of animals that are attached to something solid out there in the sand.

And really, these animals are very closely related to animals with a backbone which would be animals, you know, like us.

The name sea pork is common.

>> He looks like a big pile of muscle or something.

<Rudy> Yeah.

<Beryl> I really can't -- >> Sometimes it's that orange color, sometimes it's a pink, sometimes it's almost, you know, a whitish milky color.

But it is a group of animals, surprisingly enough.

There are really two or three things here that are interesting.

Here's one of the bivalves called the Dosinia clam.

We saw that on an earlier show.

<Beryl> Dosinia clam.

<Rudy> Uh-huh, I picked up, by the way, a bit of another animal with a backbone.

You know what kind of animal left that feather on the beach?

>> No, tell me.

(laughs) Brown pelican.

Real common feather to find on the beach.

And it's real thick down here at the base.

And they're coming animals here.

>> That's a nice quill.

>> Here's one that I think is just super.

>> Oh, that is a gorgeous shell!

>> It's called a banded tulip because of those bands.

And it's one of the marine snails that actually covers up the body with a little operculum, it's called.

You see that pretty distinctively and that operculum protects the animal.

And, of course, when the animal dies, the operculum washes up on the beach, as well as the shell.

The animal's body, you see, is still inside this shell.

It hadn't really decayed yet.

>> It really has a shell covering.

>> Yeah, exactly.

And this one is a univalve.

It only has one shell.

One other crab that we, since we've been looking at crabs today, I think a good name for this would be Calico Crab.

And that's one of the common names.

Dolly Varden crab is another common name.

What do you call that little animal living on top of it thing?

>> I don't know.

What is it?

>> What is that?

A barnacle.

And these barnacles, although many people think they're closely related to clams, are really more closely related to the crab it's riding on.

A great variety of living things out here in the ocean.

And one of the craziest.

Look at this.

>> Oh, yes!

What a nice piece.

<Rudy> Remember this sponge?

<Beryl> Sponge, yeah.

>> It's really just the skeleton of the animal, but still a very exciting one.

Again, an animal of a strange variety.

>> It's hard to think of material like this, though, as an animal.

>> Well, it's the skeleton of the animal, really, instead of the animal directly.

Made out of a substance known as spongin, which makes sense, doesn't it?

And, of course, this thing, you remember, another big bivalve that gets washed up on the beach after storms often.

>> We saw that last year at the beach.

>> Sea pin.

Let's hurry on and see what else we can find.

Our time is short.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Just see what we can see.

I'll pick up a couple of things and pick up anything that looks interesting.

(shells crunching) >> Oh, that's a beaut, thick!

(footfalls) >> You know, walking around like this makes me wonder what kind of animals used to live here.

>> I wonder what the early humans who lived here, the Indians that were so common on -- Here's a nice one.

-- Edisto Beach, used to -- >> This is the home of the Edisto Indians, isn't it?

>> Right.

Right.

And of course, they fed on many of the animals from the ocean.

The oysters and the clams were fed on by early man in South Carolina.

Tremendous amount of nutritional value in the animals that live in the ocean, of course.

And today we're thinking about actually farming, you know, the ocean.

Oh, my goodness.

Look at this.

Now this is, oh, me!

This is kind of one of those things that's interesting and sad at the same time.

Do you know what that is the remains of?

>> It looks like a turtle, and to me it looks pretty big.

>> It's a turtle.

It's upside down here.

Just the skeleton remains.

And it's one of the loggerhead sea turtles, I'm sure.

One of the endangered species in South Carolina and really all over its range.

>> This turtle?

>> This turtle.

You're not allowed to injure them, of course, or kill them.

We're just coming upon the skeleton and finding it.

But these animals get to be a lot larger than this.

This is probably a male turtle because of the smaller size.

>> This is a smaller size?

>> Yeah, oh, yeah.

They get, the shell gets, you know, four feet or so long.

And the female may weigh a few hundred pounds.

The shell you see is held together by skin, the great deal of which is gone.

But you still see a little bit left.

An ingenious way to make a home for yourself, the shell of these animals, and we may be able to actually pull out, put these shells down a moment.

>> What is that?

And we're disturbing the insects that are feeding here.

>> Yeah, the flies are here.

Again, the insects don't do well in the ocean, but they do come to the edge to make do.

This is a part of the top shell of the turtle.

This, of course, you know, would be the outside part of it.

And one of the neat things about turtles is that their ribs, and this is one rib, their ribs actually grow into the shell, which is really a part of their skin.

And so, the ribs and the shell fuse together to form one nice solid structure.

And these animals, of course, have done quite well.

We find their fossils in South Carolina.

They take them back millions and millions of years.

They're still living out in the oceans off shore.

>> Rudy, what is that weird looking thing over there.

>> Let me reach for it and get it.

This is kind of an interesting animal that really does have a history that we can trace way back in time.

We find fossils of this animal in rocks that are hundreds of millions of years old.

It's changed very little in a long period of time.

Some people actually call this a living fossil, which sounds a little funny to me, but anyhow...

This is called a horseshoe crab because of the fact the front part of the shell, you see, is in the shape of a horseshoe.

Some people call them king crabs.

And really, in fact, they're not more, they're not really closely related to the true crabs, but more closely related to the scorpions, which were one of the first animals, at least in most people's interpretation, one of the first animals to leave that safe ocean and to begin to assault the rather unsafe land.

This animal, you see has a pair of compound eyes here like a lot of the insects do, and that orients it mainly due to the fact that light is coming from this way or that.

And, of course, it has some spines and a tail that looks like a stinger to some people.

It's not a stinger at all.

>> It's not a stinger.

<Rudy> No there's nothing about this animal that can harm you unless you just are afraid of it, and you think it's going to hurt you.

And then, of course, you can hurt yourself trying to get away from it.

This one is a male.

Remember, we were talking about male and female blue crabs a moment ago.

This horseshoe crab here is a male.

And you can tell it is because these front legs are modified to form little bulbs and a little knob.

And this allows him to hang on to the back.

He hangs on to the back of the female shell with those.

She lays eggs in the sand, and he deposits sperm.

>> On the eggs themselves.

>> On the eggs themselves, yeah, it's external fertilization.

And these animals have been crawling up to the shores of North America ever since there's been a North America.

>> That's something to think about: The fact that we had to evolve and man structure had to adapt, but with find creatures and still very close to their original form.

>> And a lot of these creatures have lifestyles that are not very demanding.

They eat almost anything.

They can live almost anywhere.

And one of the animals that fits that category is this animal.

Of course, the oceans haven't really changed much either during a long period of time.

A horseshoe crab with a little fly you see sitting on there, too.

What you got there?

>> Oh, well, you know how I am.

I'm a sucker for things that just look pretty.

>> You know, this shell from the song “Cockles and Mussels.” This is one of the giant Atlantic cockles.

And you see, it's a bivalve, of course, coming in two sections.

It is edible.

Of course, this one's a little large to eat.

This is one variety of cockle, but let me show you one more that I got along with a couple other shells.

This one is known as the yellow cockle.

It's smaller in size in that one, and it's also identified, but that -- >> It's yellow!

<Rudy> And in a little bit of sunlight, you can really appreciate the yellow, not only on the outside, but you can open this thing up pretty easily and see a tremendous amount of yellow.

You see, also on the inside.

>> Is the color the only difference, though?

>> One of the differences.

And this one, you see, gets to be a larger size.

These both are probably about as big as they're going to get.

Both of these animals lie in the sand and filter goodies out of the water.

It's a nice way to live.

Wish I could do that.

This is a hard shelled clam is a common name for it.

It's got that purple on the inside of it that's very distinctive.

It's one of the clams that's edible.

We eat it today.

We eat a lot of things from that ocean today.

An early man in South Carolina living along this beach also fed on this animal and tossed his shells into a big garbage pile, really, or garbage dump area, I guess, would be the best way to think of it.

Called a shell midden, or a shell mound.

We find them in South Carolina today.

Little evidence of man along the ocean.

>> Oh, that's a beauty.

>> This is one of my favorite shells called a horse conch.

It again, is not really a true conch, but we call it that.

It's one of the tulip shells, but it's one of the largest marine snails that we have in South Carolina.

It really is the largest in size and can get twice as big.

>> Another animal to add to the variety.

>> There's a great variety of things.

Have you got anything else you need to look at before we hurry on?

>> I put something in my pocket as we walked along, a bone, but I don't know what.

>> This is another piece of sea turtle.

It may be the same loggerhead that we found here.

Part of the front legs, the shoulder portion of the animal.

One other thing I want to mention.

You step across here.

A lot of the material that's found on the beaches is referred to as seaweed.

And much of it is the sponge that we saw back there.

But this is one of the true seaweeds.

It's kind of brown in color here, one of the plants that live in the ocean.

But this is a voyager.

It came from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in the Sargasso Sea.

It's called sargassum.

<Beryl> Sargassum.

<Rudy> And it floats out there in tremendous mats for miles and miles.

Every now and then some breaks loose and eventually gets blown in during a storm up on our beaches.

It's always fun when you're beachcombing to look for something that has come from somewhere else.

>> So it's sort of a semi alien force too.

(laughs) >> Yeah, in a sense, it's floating in.

Let's see what we can find further on.

<Beryl> Rudy, I had never noticed that shells have so many different colors.

>> Well, we're getting fresher shells.

These animals are just recently dead, and that allows the colors to really remain pretty much the same.

Let's try to walk this edge and see what we can see.

Interesting piece here.

<Beryl> Oh, you know, driftwood is one of my favorite things in the world.

>> Yeah, it's beautifully worked, as you can see.

And it's sort of a sign, the fact that there used to be some high ground here that's now been worn away.

>> Rudy, what is driftwood, really?

>> Well, the name implies that you're talking about wood that has been floating, drifting, you know, for a long time on the ocean, usually most people think.

Probably the easiest way to define or describe driftwood is it's water worn wood.

Three W's: water, worn, wood.

It does not have to really drift.

This tree is probably too large to have done much drifting.

It was probably growing in pretty much this same vicinity, and the roaring ocean, the Atlantic, has come in and taken away that bit of ground and now left the carcass of this tree behind.

But it is worn by water.

You really can find, you know, driftwood in large lakes very commonly as well as along the seashore.

But, of course, when you look at something like this -- >> Well, it looks like a natural sculpture or something.

It's beautiful.

>> This is really the base of the tree, and these are actually roots that are giving it this beautiful look and it's just tilted up on its side.

>> This is a live oak tree, isn't it?

<Rudy> Probably a live oak.

And they're real, you know, common in this part of the state and along the coast, especially.

But it is beautifully worked.

A couple of things we ought to look at here.

And I think... Yeah, I thought so.

>> It's our friend again, the horseshoe.

>> This is our friend, except it's just instead of the male, the smaller one that we saw earlier, now, we've got an animal with really some size to it.

And again, this is the female, much larger in size.

The male uses those little pronged projections, you know, on the front pair of legs to hang on right here on the sides of the female's shell.

And she deposits eggs in the sand and he deposits sperm over them.

And that's the way the eggs are fertilized.

And again, they crawl out of that ocean in the spring and summer on these beaches.

They've been doing that ever since North America has been here.

Fabulous animal.

>> That's a really weird looking grass or reed or something.

>> Yeah, most people along the beach, would call this like everything else that's kicked up that looks like a plant, seaweed.

It's really not a plant at all.

This is another animal colony in disguise, is probably the best way to think about it.

It's one of the corals.

>> This is coral?

>> Yeah, you see, it's real soft, though.

Fairly soft compared to the hard coral that you usually find.

And this is known as whip coral, I guess because of the fact that it looks like just a group of whips that are that are held together, sometimes it's red in color, sometimes purple.

And of course, often this yellow.

>> Seems to be something growing on this one too.

>> Yeah, this little thing hugging the little whip coral is a Bryozoan, which is, a common name for it is a moss animal.

Called that because it sort of covers things like moss would cover a rock or the base of a tree in a forest.

But again, the ocean is just loaded with a great amount of diversity.

And you see a lot of that reflected in what comes up on the beach, but really, a couple of other things -- >> Just looking at the shells.

<Rudy> See if you can get that one.

And I've got something here that's kind of crazy.

>> What is this?

>> All right, this is called a lettered olive.

There are a lot of different olive shells.

And this one looks as if, if you look carefully, that maybe somebody scribbled on there, maybe done some hieroglyphics, or something written on it.

And so the name, common name is lettered olive, and that makes sense.

These are real common in South Carolina.

Washed up on the beach.

Another predator.

This is something that I wonder I wish I could have asked the Indians that were living here, "What did you think when you found this washed up?"

This looks like it's manmade, but it isn't at all.

It was produced by a shark and it's a piece of the backbone of a shark.

>> This is a shark vertebrae.

>> Yeah.

A piece of the vertebra.

Doesn't look very much like a vertebra because all the projections are gone.

But the shark skeleton is made out of cartilage, which is real flimsy.

But as it gets older, there's a tremendous amount of calcium salts laid down.

It hardens the skeleton and allows some parts of it to become fossilized.

>> Why, Rudy, today has really been a history lesson for us, I think.

>> Well, it's been a lot of fun.

And one thing I think that's important to tell people who watch is that if you like this show, and we hope you do, respond to us, we like to hear from you, but we encourage you to get out on the beaches in South Carolina or into the mountains or wherever and have these experiences for yourself.

It's worth more than money.

>> It sure is.

We hope you'll join us beachcombing sometime.

Come on, I think we should keep doing more of the same.

>> There's more to be seen.

Let's walk toward that little bit of island.

♪ <Beryl> Oh, it looks like the perfect oasis or something, doesn't it?

<Rudy> Oasis in a desert.

(laughter) ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪