♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ Hello, I'm Beryl Dakers, and here we are standing amid what is fast becoming one of the most recognizable vines across South Carolina.

It's called kudzu, and it's just one of many plant and animal life-forms alien to our state.

With me is Rudy Mancke, the Curator of Natural History for the South Carolina Museum Commission.

Rudy, these alien plant and animal life-forms are really our topic for today.

Right.

This is probably one of the most exciting shows we're going to do because we're going to point out that a lot of the things we think are naturally here, have always been here, haven't.

They've been brought in, introduced by man for the most part, in the past, and have in some instances spread and covered all over South Carolina and all over the Southeast and spread quite a bit.

It's fun to follow up on the roots, so to speak, of the plants and animals that are aliens to find out where they come from and why they were brought over.

Some of them were brought over inadvertently.

The seed just got mixed in with something you wanted to bring over, and then it escaped, and now it's very hard to control.

Kudzu is one of those stories that's probably one of the more interesting of the stories.

Let's start with that story because certainly it seems to be one of the forms that's about to overtake us.

(Rudy) It covers things very well.

Back in the early 1900s in South Carolina, especially on the piedmont, there was a tremendous amount of soil erosion.

It's very important not to have soil erode away, and so you try to control that.

One of the things that was thought to be able to do that was kudzu.

It's native to Japan and Asia, and it does a good job of covering gullies and holding soil, and so it was introduced in the 1930s and 1940s into North America, especially the Southeast, to control gully erosion and does a great job of that.

(Beryl) What accounts for its seeming rapid-fire growth across the state?

It certainly isn't confined to gullies anymore.

No, one of the things that you must remember about any alien plant or animal is that there are very few built-in controls.

The environment doesn't have control systems already set up to control the size of the population.

So when you bring in something brand new, it can often escape.

One of the things that we've discovered about alien plants and animals in the state of South Carolina is that once they've been introduced, there is a very short period of time where you've got control.

Then they break out of control, like kudzu, and cover buildings and cars and small children if they stand still long enough.

It does grow very rapidly.

In Japan, the underground stem is eaten as a delicacy.

Cattle eat the leaves every now and then.

But in South Carolina, generally, except where it does control gully erosion, it's thought of as a weed, which is really a name that doesn't mean a lot.

It's just a plant that's growing where you don't want it to grow.

That's the best way to define what a weed is.

Let's move along and take a closer look at this particular plant because we've noticed that it has a flower.

The flowers, I think, Beryl -- just take a look at these -- are really rather beautiful.

When you walk into a kudzu mass this time of year, with flowers on it, you can almost get a smell of grapes.

It's a rather pleasant smell.

It's a member of the pea , as the flowers can point , and we'll see some fruit in a minute, and that looks like the pd on one of the pea plants.

Quite a few insects are coming to this plant to help pollinate it and o to get nectar for themsel.

So this modified variety of pea plant that used to be found only in the other parts of the world, Asia mainly, has now come in and taken over.

It grows very rapidly, and you see how it gets up on top of things and often shades out plants underneath it.

In that way, it can actuay kill plants that are growg underneath it because it shades out the sunlight.

It also seems to be a good home for a lot of insects, aside from the bees and things we hear.

Oh, yeah, quite a few insects feed on it.

The buzzing sounds that we hear in the background... [insects buzzing] (Rudy) Those buzzing sounds are meadow grasshoppers, which are all over here.

(Beryl) Not crickets?

(Rudy) No.

They're feeding on the kudzu to some degree, but mainly on the grasses.

It's covered this fence area, and it can cover large trees.

Sometimes the sculpture, kudzu sculpture, is perhaps a good way to talk about it.

When it covers trees, it's kind of pleasing.

(Beryl) There is something eerie about the fact that it's growing up around us and over us, though.

(Rudy) Yeah, yeah.

It does grow very rapidly, and that's one os I think causes s. Although you need to realize that as far as controlg gully erosion, it's gr.

It does that job very nicely.

Look at the way it's towering over this pecan tree.

(Rudy) Let's look at the fruit on this one strand coming over, and I think you can see here.

(Beryl) Oh, it's fuzzy.

(Rudy) Yeah, it's real fuzzy, and yet it looks like a bean pod.

Again, this is in the pea family, pea and bean family.

If you look at the leaves on kudzu, you'll see there are three leaflets that make up one solid leaf, just like the beans, soybeans and other beans that we grow.

But the fruit is very fuzzy, and that's typical of kudzu vine.

As you see, it's towering over and coming down.

Once the flowers are gone, a few of them develop into fruit.

Those that have been fertilized develop into a fruit like this.

(Beryl) I'm sure, as we move along, the question that most viewers have is: How do you get rid of this stuff when there is too much of it?

(Rudy) Well, it's awfully hard.

There are some animals that will feed on it.

Sheep, goats will feed on it, dig it up.

Hogs will sometimes root it up and eat the roots.

Cattle eat the leaves.

It's usually best to plow up an area and get rid of it, but it's important to remember that soil is very important, and we don't want it to go away.

If you have to lose a lot of soil to get rid of a little kudzu, it might be smarter to keep the kudzu.

(Beryl) Keep the kudzu around.

(Rudy) Yeah.

Here is another non-native plant that's interesting.

One of the interesting things to me is the fact that it's got this interesting leaf.

Now, that's a single leaf.

Most of the time people would not think of that as a single leaf, but it is, and it's one that's -- (Beryl) You mean this entire branch that you're holding in your hand?

(Rudy) This whole thing is a leaf.

It's one of the compound leaves that's doubly compound.

It's compound, one split here, and then it divides again out in this section.

This is called chinaberry, and it's called that for a bunch of reasons.

It is found in China, and it does have a berry-like fruit.

It's found all over Asia, and it's been imported.

We can see here that the fruit this time of year has a greenish color to it, but as it gets colder, in the wintertime especially, it becomes more waxen, almost the color of bone china.

(Beryl) Very squishy, as I remember from my childhood.

(Rudy) Very squishy, right.

These trees are extremely common now throughout South Carolina, but they were introduced some time ago, probably because the flowers are nice.

It's an interesting looking bluish flower on the tree.

They've escaped now and gone all over the place.

The fruit is poisonous.

One of the reasons you'll drive down the road in the wintertime and see a chinaberry tree loaded with fruit is that very few animals can feed on the fruit without being injured.

(Beryl) Including man.

(Rudy) Including humans.

The fruit in the wintertime is poisonous, so it's one of our poisonous plants, another import from Asia.

(Beryl) The chinaberry tree.

(Rudy) Yeah.

Let's see one other thing, Japanese honeysuckle, one we saw earlier.

Take a close look at it.

(Beryl) I thought that honeysuckle was native to South Carolina.

(Rudy) You're right for most of the varieties that we've got, but the Japanese honeysuckle, and the name kind of gives it away, is not native, and flowers all during the spring and summer.

These are the typical flowers.

Some are yellow, and some are white in color.

These are the flowers people like to sip the nectar out of, pull out the flower and bite off the end and sip out the nectar, but it's not a native species.

Probably brought over because of the fragrance of the flowers, and there is much written in poetry about the beautiful smell in the spring especially, and the summer, of the honeysuckle.

This is one variety that has escaped out of the backyards and now covers the countryside very commonly.

Not only do you see the flowers here, but you can also see fruit.

See those little brown things there?

(Beryl) Oh, yes.

(Rudy) That's fruit of the Japanese honeysuckle.

There are quite a few varieties of honeysuckle that are native.

The most common one that most people know is the trumpet honeysuckle, or woodbine.

That's very, very common.

This is an Asiatic species that has come and escaped from us, gotten out of hand.

(Beryl) A nice one, though.

(Rudy) It is interesting.

Let's see what else we can see.

(Beryl) Okay.

[ vehicular noise ] (Rudy) We're stopping on the side of the road.

We've got to keep far enough away so we won't get hit.

A lot of times when you're riding through the coastal plain of South Carolina, you see this, these white birds in a field associated with cattle.

They look a little bit like one of the egrets, and, in fact, they are called cattle egrets because of the fact that they do associate with cattle.

This is not a bird that's normally found in North America.

It came over in the 1950s, probably flying across to South America from Africa first and then working its way up into South Carolina.

These animals are the same birds that sit on the backs of elephants or wildebeests or giraffes in Africa, the same species.

It just so happens that they migrated over here.

They're associated with these animals because they eat on insects, feed on insects.

Rather than work to get the insects out of the grass, they follow the cattle as they walk and pick up insects that are scared up by the movement of the cows.

These are real common down here and one of the many animals that are not supposed to be here but that have come over and seem to be doing well.

In the winter, they do migrate south a little bit, but they're with us all summer in South Carolina.

Kind of an interesting story because it's the only bird we know about that has naturally migrated into North America since we've been looking at things like that.

(Beryl) It is rather unlikely that the birds flew all the way from Africa, isn't it?

(Rudy) It's unlikely, but they could take a ship, to some degree, land on one and follow it a while, but most likely these birds actually did make the entire trip, stopping on some islands, Ascension Island, for instance, halfway between, and then coming on to South America.

From what we can tell, no humans were involved with importing them.

They came here on their own, and that happens naturally in the world.

Migrations do occur like this.

Next time you see a picture of an elephant with one of these white birds on its back, just remember that they're right here in South Carolina.

There are other things to see, so we need to hurry on the way.

These are very common.

And next time you pass them in cars on the highway, it would be good to think about the ancestry of these cattle egrets and how they got here over twenty, thirty years ago now.

(Beryl) Rudy, what makess an interesting st to look for alie?

(Rudy) One of the things that's interesting about it, and the one reason we're here, is the fact that you find things like this in the water.

These are not alive now, but let me pick up one or two.

There are quite a few here.

Why don't we sit and talk about them a minute because this is one animal that has been introduced into South Carolina, and we're not really sure how, and has really caused problems and taken over some areas.

(Beryl) It's a clam?

(Rudy) It's called the Asiatic clam, and that tells us that it's alien, that it's not from here.

It is from Asia, especially the Philippines.

It was introduced in the United States on the Pacific Coast in the early 1950s.

We know who introduced it over there.

What we don't know is how in the world it got from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic Coast and is now in all of the river systems in the state of South Carolina, coming a good ways up the river.

These things are different from most clams because, if you know about these little clams, they spend part of their lives attached to fish.

They've got one stage: the eggs hatch, they attach on fish.

A lot of times when you see a fish in the water, you'll see little black dots on him.

Those are little clams that are attaching themselves.

The fish carries them elsewhere, and they live on him awhile and fall to the bottom and become clammy looking with a nice distinctive shell and spend most of their life filtering goodies out of the water.

These don't have that intermediate stage, and so they can lay eggs which become clams directly and fill all the spaces that are available in the river, so the clams we've normally had here don't have anyplace to live.

The population levels on these things go up unbelievably.

(Beryl) This is, like most of the aliens we've been looking at, a hardier species.

(Rudy) It seems to be.

It seems to be able to reproduce more rapidly.

It doesn't have the same involved life cycle as some of the common clams and mussels we have native in the state.

It's spread all up the rivers in South Carolina.

The reason we happened to pick this area is because of the dam behind us, which produces hydroelectric power for this area, and hydroelectric dams like this have an intake for water which turns a turbine.

What do you think would happen if this clam population built up so high on the intake side that it clogged the intake spaces?

(Beryl) So we're talking about a lot of clams.

(Rudy) We're talking about a lot of clams in a short period of time.

These folks at this hydroelectric plant and others are having real major problems.

How in the world can you control the population, or how can you clean these things out of the intake valve, because they're very hard to get rid of.

See the little purplish color on it?

Very, very distinctive, and sometimes even the inside is a bluish-purple color.

Raccoons eat these, river otters will take advantage of them and other animals will feed on them, but not enough to control populations.

It's something that looks like we've always had it because it's so common, but it's one of the aliens that sneaked in on us.

(Beryl) All right.

(Rudy) Not sure how it got here.

(Beryl) No other aliens to be found around the river?

(Rudy) I don't think in this spot, but there are so many we could talk about.

We're trying to pick out a few that are highlights.

Why don't we just take a little extra trip now and see what we can find.

(Beryl) Okay.

♪ (Beryl) It's amazing what you can find driving along the roadsides if you take the time to stop and look.

(Rudy) There is a lot to see.

One of the nice things about these alien plants and animals is that they're most often found along roadways, places that are frequented by people.

That's one way they're spread.

Seed get caught on the back of a truck or something, and they blow off on the side of the road.

Another good place to look for aliens is along railroad tracks because the train from somewhere else is going to bring these seed in, and they'll get knocked off and grow.

(Beryl) Is that how these grasses got here, by seed blowing along the roadway?

(Rudy) Probably so, yeah.

These things are called giant reeds.

They are one of the grasses, as the leaves will tell you.

It's one of the tallest grasses that we've got.

It's not native; it's an escape.

They're beginning to spread around South Carolina now and often follow roadways like the one we're on.

(Beryl) Is this related to pampas grass and to sea oats, things like that?

(Rudy) Yeah, one of the grasses that gets fairly tall.

Sea oats is native in South Carolina.

The pampas grass is a South American/Central American import that has also escaped, very much like the giant reed.

Those little tassely things on the top are really the fruit that can be blown by the wind and moved from this place to that very easily and spread.

Once a plant or an animal gets a foothold in a new environment, it often takes over.

This is one of the plants that's gotten a foothold now that seems to be doing just that.

Let's see what else we can find.

(Beryl) Beautiful blowing in the wind.

(Rudy) Yeah.

(Rudy) It's really tall.

(Rudy) This is one plant across the road that we had to come look at, Beryl, because it's one of the aliens that has caused some problems.

We're lucky enough to find it with the fruit on it down here and also these long, tubular flowers.

(Beryl) Now, this is jimsonweed.

It's something I've been looking at all my life, never realizing that it was an alien.

(Rudy) Well, jimsonweed is one of the aliens, and this is one of the aliens that is extremely poisonous.

This is a plant that -- the leaves, the flowers, the stems, the roots, the fruit, all are poisonous.

As a matter of fact, it's probably one of the most poisonous plants we've got in the state.

As you see from where we're standing, it grows near people, and so it's very good to realize that this is an extremely poisonous plant and to keep the kids away from it.

It's one of those imports that we wish had never been brought over.

These seed are transported by birds from this field to other fields.

You find them in downtown, large cities, on vacant lots and waste places, and so it's one that we need to know.

The fruit is pretty distinctive here.

It's nice and spiny, and looking down inside you see all of these seed that I'm breaking off into my hand.

It takes probably two or three of those small seed to kill a small child if they were to ingest them.

(Beryl) They're really dangerous.

Finding this in populated areas and in fields like this, do we have much problems with birds or cattle getting hold of it?

(Rudy) You'd have some problems.

Jimsonweed is most deadly, though, to mammals, animals with hair like us, and they do cause some problems.

Birds don't seem to be nearly as badly affected because they can pick up the seed as they're picking up other seed in the field and fly somewhere else and drop them without worrying terribly about losing their lives.

These little seed contain chemical substances that are hallucinogenic and then cause eventual death and rather rapid death.

It's one that's very good to know.

It's one of those things we have no control over now, because they are already here; they're hard to get rid of.

It's one of the plants that are not native, not naturally found in South Carolina.

(Beryl) An alien we should remember.

(Rudy) An alien we should remember.

Let's see what else we can see.

(Beryl) Okay.

(Rudy) Edges of fields are good places to walk, so keep your eyes open, see if we can see anything on the edge.

(Beryl) You never know what you're going to find.

(Rudy) Right.

(Beryl) Is this our friend from the other show?

(Rudy) It sure is.

Let's take a look.

You can remember on the winter woods show a while back, we saw the egg case of this animal, the praying mantis.

We do have one or two varieties that are native in the state, but they're smaller.

These big fellows and gals are imports.

This one happens to be from the Asiatic part of the world, Asia and China.

The Chinese mantis is the common name for it.

Just putting my hand close to it, you can see that it's a pretty large animal.

(Beryl) Yeah.

(Rudy) Called the praying mantis because it preys on other insects, and it also holds those front legs pulled up as if it were praying.

If it's praying for anything, it's for prey to come along.

This is one of nature's ways of controlling insect populations.

(Beryl) Oh, the color is so perfectly matched you really have to look to see him.

I've heard that these things have stingers, but I don't see one.

(Rudy) There is no stinger at all.

The front legs have little spines on them that can sometimes cause problems to a human.

They feel like they are sticking you a little.

They're generally very quiet and usually will just walk right up on your hand.

And as you see, this animal has got some pretty good size on it.

The front legs are really well modified for grasping, reaching, grabbing.

The back legs are just for holding on.

It does have wings, but it doesn't do a lot of flying.

(Beryl) But he can fly.

(Rudy) He can fly, yes.

They're pretty good fliers.

These were introduced in the New England states in the 1900s and first appeared in South Carolina probably in the 1950s.

We find them in the upper part of our state now all the way down to the Columbia area.

Won't hurt you at all, but they are fabulous animals for feeding on other insects and controlling insect populations, caterpillars included.

(Beryl) This is an alien that happens to be a friend.

(Rudy) An alien that happens to fit in fairly well with the world around us.

One of the nice things to remember is that nature is very balanced.

This is one of the reasons why aliens sometimes cause it to become unbalanced and quite a problem, but this is one that seems to have fitted in pretty well.

(Beryl) What a magnificent insect.

(Rudy) Oh, isn't it spectacular?

We'll just leave her to her hunting, pick her off here.

(Beryl) She likes you as well as the bush.

(Rudy) It seems to.

She'll have good hunting here.

There are other things to see.

(Beryl) Let's go looking.

(Rudy) This area is a good example of one of the aliens that was brought in because of a beautiful flower and has now escaped pretty well.

Do you know the name of this tree?

(Beryl) I sure do, Rudy.

This is a Mimosa.

(Rudy) Mimosa-tree, right, or silk tree some people call it.

The flower on it is really almost like a powder-puff, pinkish in color.

(Beryl) Feathery-looking thing that sets off sneezes in springtime.

(Rudy) Yeah.

It's very nice.

The fruit on the tree, after the flowers are gone, look like beans, and it's in the same family.

If you can listen... [rattling] (Rudy) One of the common names, no offense to anyone, of course, would be mother-in-law's tongue.

Many people call this mother-in-law's tongue.

I think you can hear sort of a flapping sound of the seed that are in this nice, little covering.

That seed is capable of lasting for a long time before it germinates, and that's why often you get clumps of trees in one area.

These seed pods don't get blown very far.

They fall to the ground, the seed comes out, and then you get a good number of trees.

(Beryl) Was the Mimosa purposely brought here because of its beauty?

(Rudy) Because of its beauty.

It was an ornamental, and it's an Asiatic plant that was brought in, put in gardens.

It is very interesting.

The leaves are nice because they're compound and feathery looking.

That's pretty, too, but that flower is really what made the difference.

These don't get very tall, not much bigger than the ones around us here.

(Beryl) They do spread out laterally.

(Rudy) They do spread out and make a pretty nice showy plant in the backyard.

We got something else that's really showy in the net on the way over.

(Beryl) A little fellow here.

(Rudy) Yeah.

I don't know how well this little one is going to do.

These butterflies are found often flying over cabbage fields.

Can you guess the name of the butterfly?

(Beryl) You're going to tell me it's a cabbage butterfly.

(Rudy) It's a cabbage butterfly.

If you wanted to be precise, you'd call it the European cabbage butterfly because this variety is native to Europe.

It has been introduced, much to our chagrin, into North America, and now the larva feeds on cabbage.

This is one of the butterflies that is not native.

If you go to England or to Switzerland or wherever, you'll see this fellow fluttering by over there just like he does here.

(Beryl) We don't think he crossed the ocean by himself, do we?

(Rudy) These, we feel pretty sure, were brought into our country before the customs people really looked very carefully, as they do today, at plants being brought in.

This is why you don't want to let anything be brought in.

You want to be careful because some of these aliens can cause problems.

This one, of course, does.

We'll just let it... (Beryl) He's a cute little fellow.

(Rudy) Why don't we leave now and go to a place I think everybody will be familiar with and talk a little more about aliens in South Carolina.

(Beryl) Okay.

(Beryl) Rudy, I can't think of a more familiar sight to South Carolinians than pigeons on the State House grounds.

(Rudy) Right.

These are joined by these small birds that will probably fly pretty quickly, the house sparrows.

Both of these animals are not native to South Carolina.

The house sparrows are also known as English sparrows, and that tells you they're from England and Europe.

(Beryl) And the pigeons?

(Rudy) The pigeons, the better name for them really would be rock doves, because that's what they're called in Europe.

They were brought over by people coming to the New World, in a sense to take a part of the Old World with them.

They used them as messenger pigeons and raised them quite often.

Now they've escaped and do quite well in cities and towns of all sizes throughout the United States and all over South Carolina.

(Beryl) Examples of aliens that have not only survived but that seem to have adapted better than a lot of us.

(Rudy) They've filled in a lot of spaces that other birds have been removed from that don't like to live around people.

Sometimes these aliens can fit in fairly well.

A lot of the real common plants and animals, as we've seen, are really not native.

They have been brought in, one way or another, and escaped.

Now they're naturalized, we say, which means it's almost as if they've been here all the time.

(Beryl) It's something to speculate on the various plant and animal life-forms in our state.

Thank you for joining us for "NatureScene."

Rudy, let's keep looking.

(Rudy) Okay.

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