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.

The salt marsh is one of the most important habitats in the Lowcountry.

First of all, it's a nursery.

It's a place for small fish and crabs and things to grow up and get being enough where they can take care of themselves out in the open water.

The other thing is it's important for recreation.

It's a place for us to throw a cast net or to fish or to kayak.

But the key to the salt marsh is this plant right here, saltmarsh cordgrass, or spartina grass.

Let's take a trip through the salt marsh, one of the most incredible habitats of the Lowcountry.

Now, look at the fiddler crabs here.

I have to be careful I don't accidentally step on any of them.

I mean, there are thousands and thousands of fiddler crabs here, and these appear to mostly be the type of fiddler crab called a sand fiddler, a Uca pugilator, and I can tell because they have these real pretty sort of porcelain looking backs.

In fact, some people call this crab a china-back fiddler because they have these great sort of china-looking patterns on their back.

They look almost like porcelain.

Now, this is a male fiddler crab, and I can tell because he has one large claw and he also has a small feeding claw.

So that's how important finding a mate is, that you're willing to sacrifice an entire eating apparatus so that you can attract a mate.

And so male fiddler crabs will stand next to their burrow and they'll wave that claw, and that's how they find the female crab of their dreams, so to speak.

And this claw, although it looks really, really dangerous, is really not too bad.

I mean, it pinches pretty good -- actually, it pinches pretty well.

It -- they're fairly sharp, but it's not dangerous to people at all.

Fiddler crabs feed on pluff mud, and what they do is pull up little particles or little piles of pluff mud, put it into their mouth parts, and then they glean out the things that they like to eat, algae, all sorts of small animals and things, and that's what they ingest.

The rest of it they spit back out, and they form these little balls, and you'll see these all across the marsh.

What's kind of neat is fiddler crabs, while they're feeding, they're actually cleaning the marsh and they're also aerating it and doing things like that.

So we have just one species.

There are actually three types of fiddler crabs that we have in the Lowcountry.

We have the sand fiddler, like this one.

We have the mud fiddler, and then we have another one called the red-jointed fiddler crab.

Let's look for a couple of other species.

All right, here is the species that I was most excited about seeing.

This is called a red-jointed fiddler crab, and the first thing you notice about this crab is look how big it is!

I mean, this is probably twice as big as your standard fiddler crab.

This species is Uca minax, and it is the red-jointed fiddler crab, and you can see there are little red joints between the claws here, and actually at the base of the claw, and this is obviously a male.

I mean, you can tell.

Look at this huge claw.

And this one probably pinches pretty hard.

We'll just kind of see -- [Laughs] You can see him kind of pulsing, and, you know, this is a pretty formidable weapon.

You can imagine things like birds and stuff might not be willing to pick one of these up because of this claw.

The other claw is the feeding claw, and that's what it uses to scoop up pluff mud and to get it to its mouth where it can process it to get things to eat.

Anyway, beautiful crab.

This is one that you generally find in areas where fresh water is running into the marsh somewhere.

So if you can find an area where rainwater rushes in or something like that, you're going to see a lot more red-jointed fiddler crabs.

So we'll put this guy back down and let him kind of carry on about his business.

Spartina grass is the only plant that lives in the salt marsh, in the deep salt marsh.

Further south you get mangroves and things, but locally, this is all we have, and that's because it's the only plant that lives in full-strength ocean water.

And one of the things you notice about spartina grass is that it has these little snails on it.

These are called periwinkle snails, and they actually feed on the spartina, not so much the plant itself, but the fungus and other stuff that develops on the stalks.

You also notice that these little periwinkle snails tend to stay up high.

And when the water level comes up, they make sure they're above the water level, and there's a reason for that.

They have a nemesis that lives in the marsh, a predator that eats them -- blue crabs, and blue crabs are very adept at grabbing these little snails and plucking them off and eating them or sometimes crushing the whole snail.

So they like to stay up out of harm's way.

Here's some evidence of a salt marsh visitor, the telltale signs that a raccoon was looking for food out here when you see the tracks across the mud, but raccoons love the salt marsh, and that's because it's a great place to find things to eat.

They can catch shrimp and crabs and things like that.

They also can find ribbed mussels, which they can crack open and eat as well.

If you look across this mud flat, you'll notice there's just tons and tons of little holes, and these holes are home to some really cool things.

There's lots of fiddlers that live out here.

But there's some other stuff as well, so what I thought we'd do is look through some of these holes and see if we can pull some of these little guys out.

And if you look right in here, this is exactly what I was looking for.

Right here, you see a really, really neat little crab.

This is called a mud crab, and some of these things are really gorgeous.

They look like mini stone crabs, but you kind of have to get 'em out to get a look at 'em.

And he's got a lot of mud on him, but you can see this is a pretty little thing.

In fact, let's wash this guy off so we can get a better look at him.

Okay, so this is a gorgeous little crab, with a beautiful purple back and bright orange claws.

It's kind of interesting to see an animal this brightly colored living in the mud, and, you know, who knows for sure why that is, but a lot of fossorial invertebrates are like this.

You know, they're very brightly colored.

But this is one of the mud crabs that feeds on all sorts of detritus, dead animals.

Sometimes it'll catch little animals that it feeds on.

It's just kind of neat to know that under all this sort of drab-looking mud, there are some beautiful creatures like this one.

Okay, so here we are in the upper marsh, and we came across some of this material right here.

Okay, so this is wrack, w-r-a-c-k, and what this actually is is spartina grass that has broken off and died, and this stuff will wash in and out with the tides.

Some of it reaches the open ocean, but a lot of it stays right here in our creeks and rivers.

As it flows back and forth, it breaks down.

It's fed on by all sorts of small plants and animals, all sorts of detritivores, animals that eat very, very small material, and this is the basis for the Atlantic food chain.

Now, it looks kind of gross when it's floating around in the Sound and so forth, but this is very, very important.

This is the energy that's needed for all sorts of plants and animals that occur in this area.

A couple of neat plants here.

One is called saltwort, and you may notice that these things look like succulents.

They look like cacti.

And the reason for that is vascular plants need fresh water, and although there is a lot of water here, it's mostly salt water, so it's kind of like living in a desert in a lot of ways for a vascular plant.

The other one is called glasswort or pickleweed, and this plant is actually edible, so you can eat pickleweed, and I'm not a big fan of the way it tastes.

It tastes a little bit like -- like salt marsh, but it is edible.

But not that edible.

[Spits] Okay, we're on the edge of the marsh, and the first thing I noticed is that you have something called sea oxeye daisy, and this is a common plant that lives just on the upper region of the marsh.

In fact, on the edge of hammocks, like this one.

The other thing that I notice is this stuff right here, and this is called black needlerush, and needlerush is a very reasonable name for this, because, I mean, it'll stick ya, and it really hurts.

And this stuff is characteristic of areas that get flooded with salt water only occasionally.

So it can't take being submerged every day like saltmarsh cordgrass, but it can take the occasional flooding.

Okay, so here we are on the edge of the salt marsh, and what we've done is set some traps so that we can see some of the secretive animals that live in the spartina grass on the edge.

So let's pull a couple of these and see what we got.

Oh, and this one is loaded.

There's a couple of things in here.

There's -- looks like striped killifish, and then mostly what there is is mummichogs or mud minnows, and these are real commonly caught as bait for flounder and redfish and things like that.

Let's dump some of these in a bag and get a better look at 'em.

So as I said, these are mostly mud minnows, and mud minnows are incredibly common in the salt marsh, and you can imagine a lot of things eat these, wading birds like ibis and herons and things like that, as well as lots of fish.

These are food for flounder, for redfish, red drum or redfish, and also for -- Here's a trap to check.

Let's see if I can get in behind here and take this out.

Looks like more mud minnows.

As I said, these things are really common.

Actually, there is something else in here that's kind of neat, and they are grass shrimp.

Let's see if I can get one of these out.

And grass shrimp look like bigger shrimp, but they're just a much smaller species.

And here's one right here.

And this adult size, they don't get very big, and you can imagine how many fish eat these.

Okay, I'm going to get a little bit of water in my hand and see if he'll kind of sit in it.

I don't want him to dry out.

But shrimp like this, grass shrimp, are detritivores, so they're going to feed on little, tiny particles like little pieces of fish or little pieces of other animals, as well as plant material that's been broken down.

One of the best ways to catch animals in the salt marsh is to use a cast net.

Now, these come in a variety of sizes, and I'm not the best at this, but I'm going to give it a try.

So let's see what we can catch.

Okay, let's see what we have.

Oh, a fish.

Oh, a neat little fish.

Let me get a bit of water.

This is a mullet, and mullet are really, really common.

In fact, let me get my hands wet and see if I can put him in this jar.

And mullet are really, really common in the salt marsh.

This is a species that gets much bigger than this.

They get, you know, this long or so.

Great bait.

So a lot of people fish with mullet.

They fish for redfish, they fish for, you know, sharks and all sorts of things, and mostly because these things are so common.

They're herbivorous, so these things feed on plant material, algae and stuff that's in the marsh.

Okay, let's let this little guy go.

Let's see if I can reach in here and very carefully put him back in the water.

And off he goes.

Oh, cool.

We've got some little squid, and these are Atlantic brief squid.

So this is a squid, and obviously some species get very big, but these don't get much bigger than this, and these are invertebrates.

Squid can do some really cool things.

One of the things they can do is they can change color, they're some of the best chameleons around, and the color changing has to do with mood and all sorts of things.

It's a way of signaling other squid.

It probably helps with camouflage as well.

But squid are just amazing animals.

They're very intelligent.

There's a lot more to them than bait, which is what a lot of people think about them in -- in the Lowcountry.

They actually do bite.

They've got a little beak that hurts -- hurts pretty bad when they bite.

Ow, and this guy's got a pretty good grip on me.

It's just amazing that an animal this small can bite this hard, but they have a little beak, and that beak is what they use to feed on fish and crabs and small things like that.

But let me drop him in this little container and see what he does.

And he inked, and that's the way they escape.

Okay, squid move around -- they actually have little fin-type appendages that helps them kind of swim through the water, but more importantly, they use jet propulsion, or actually water propulsion, and they take water in their bodies and they eject it out very violently, and that's what fires them forward.

Squid are major predators.

Of course, they eat small things, 'cause they're small themselves, but they can eat all sorts of fish and shrimp and things like that.

They also are great food for a lot of fish species, and a lot of things like to eat squid.

Okay, well, let's put this guy back in the water and let him go.

Let me see if I can scoop him up.

I set some crab traps earlier, and I'm hoping to get some kind of neat things in these, so I'm going to pull the first one up.

Water's really deep here.

We have extremely high salinity right here as well in Port Royal Sound.

Oh, yeah, we've got some kind of cool stuff in here.

So let me pull this up and get a better close look at things.

This crab trap's been opened up, been in the water for a while, and you can see it's already starting to get barnacles on it and all sorts of things.

But we've got some kind of cool stuff in here.

The first thing is a whelk.

So this is actually a knobbed whelk.

It's one of the common whelks we have around here, and this is a live one.

A lot of times you find the shells, but we can tell this is alive because you can see the animal inside, and this is the operculum, which is the kind of hard covering.

The animal can pull its entire foot into the shell, and then this is what protects it from all sorts of predators.

I'll tell you what, whelks are major predators.

They eat bivalves, things like clams, and they use this leading edge to sort of force bivalves open.

So what they'll do is get a clam and then sort of wedge this leading edge of the shell and just push and push and push until they open it up, and then they can actually stick their stomach into the bivalve and feed on it.

Of course, this is all very slow, this isn't a fast action thing, but it's pretty impressive.

All right, let's put this guy back in.

And there's several things in here.

I'm going to reach back in the trap, and this is really cool.

This is neat, neat animal.

This is called a spider crab.

In fact, some people call this a decorator crab, and this is an animal that will actually take pieces of material and glue it to the back of its shell.

Sometimes will even put little anemones on its back or little barnacles or just pieces of shell, and that's why it's called a decorator crab, and this of course provides great camouflage for it.

Another name is spider crab.

But these guys don't have eight legs, they have ten.

Crabs are decapods, which means ten feet, ten legs.

And so this guy is missing one.

In fact, he's missing one of his claws.

Look how delicate the claws are on this animal, and that's because it picks up little, tiny pieces of small fish or small animals, and it transfers them to its mouth parts where it can ingest them.

Now, this doesn't eat big stuff like some of the other crabs do, but great design.

He's already supremely camouflaged.

Great cryptic coloration.

This helps him to blend in the bottom and hide in the mud and so forth.

So we'll put him back in, and I see one more crab, and this one I'm going to have to handle a little bit more carefully.

He's -- he's got himself in the trap pretty well.

But I think I can get a grip on him this way.

And this is the most recognizable crab that we have around here, and that is a blue crab.

And blue crabs have really, really tough claws, and this is not a big one.

In fact, this one is probably only about half grown.

And this is the crab that so many people eat in the Lowcountry.

Now, when you look at a blue crab, you're talking about just an incredible animal for form and function.

I mean, it's beautifully designed for what it does.

This is -- the scientific name of this animal is Callinectes sapidus, which means "beautiful, savory swimmer."

And the first thing I notice is this is a male, and I can tell by this projection right here.

The female would have a much broader apron, and the male has an apron which looks more like a rocket.

And so you can tell the difference right there.

Like other crabs, this has ten legs and it has -- the first two legs are chelae, or -- they're claws.

And these claws are designed for catching and tearing up food to eat.

In fact, blue crabs typically have a crusher claw, one that they can smash things with, and then they have a shredder claw, which they can use to tear apart dead fish and things like that.

They will eat dead things, but they're tremendous predators, and they can eat just about anything that they can grab in their claws, I mean of small size.

But the last legs are designed for swimming, and so these are designed for paddling, and blue crabs are very fast swimmers as well as being able to crawl real effectively on the bottom.

Blue crabs have to be five inches from spine tip to spine tip, and that's about the length of a soda can, so that gives you a pretty good idea.

Okay, here's another crab trap to pull.

Let's get this one out of the water and see what we have.

All right, a couple of things.

One of them is obviously not a crab.

Both these animals we've got to be a little bit careful with.

They're not out to hurt anybody, but, you know, they can hurt us just trying to protect themselves.

So best way to do this, I think, is to kind of just tip the trap open and see if we can real carefully fold these guys over.

And the first thing we're going to do is look at this crab, and this is a beautiful blue crab.

This is a big male, and we can first of all look at that apron, that rocket ship shaped apron, and then look at all the blue on it.

Now, this one is big enough to keep.

They have to be five inches from here to here, and this one is big enough, but we're going to let him go anyway.

But this is a big male, and we call these Jimmys.

So we'll put him back in.

And let's go ahead and look at this other animal.

Now, we have to be a little bit careful with this one.

This is a stingray, and this, we've got to avoid that spine right here, and this spine is very, very sharp and it's serrated and it's covered with a sort of mucous coating that is a really painful poison.

Actually, it's a venom, and what happens is the spine sticks in you, it leaves some of that sheath of mucous on it, and it hurts like crazy.

I've been nailed by stingrays a couple times, by small ones, and the only thing that really will make it feel better is incredibly hot water.

So if you can put your hand or your foot or whatever's affected into extremely hot water, it a lot of times will, you know, control the pain a little bit.

So we've got to be careful of that, but look at the design of this animal.

It's flat so they can sit on the bottom, it has these eye sockets that are up on top of the head, it has an area where it can take in -- sort of a gill slit so it can take in water and run it across its gills, and then, of course, the spine right here.

Now, this is a male, and I can tell because it has these claspers right here.

Females would not have those.

A lot of people feel like they need to cut the spine off, they'll chop the tail off, but we don't want to do that.

We want to just let this guy go.

He's not out to hurt anybody.

He's just well-protected.

If you're walking in the salt marsh, the best thing to do is kind of shuffle your feet, because if you step on a stingray, it can really hurt you.

I'm going to scoop this guy up.

I'm going to grab him like this, I'm going to just slide my hand up underneath him, I'm staying away from that spine, and I'm going to carry him down to the dock, where we can let him go.

Because we have such high tidal amplitude, in other words, the difference between high and low tide, a lot of water moves in and out of the salt marsh here, and because of that, animals have to have some sort of structure to hold onto.

I mean, some animals can move in and out with the tides like fish, dolphins, some of the bigger, stronger things, but the smaller stuff either is a slave to the tide, moving in and out, or, more importantly, it holds onto something.

So anything in this ecosystem that's struc-- any kind of structure -- posts or docks or anything like that -- is going to instantly be colonized by a variety of marine organisms.

So let's pull this thing up and see what we found, and there's probably a lot of things right on this rope.

Lots of stuff.

Sea squirts.

You can see all the water squirting.

You know, it's just amazing.

And so this rope has only been here a couple years, and you can see how much stuff has colonized this.

This is an old crab trap rope, and just a little piece of the crab trap is still left.

I can't believe how much water is spraying off of this thing.

Just unbelievable!

Lots of cool stuff in here.

There's a variety of small creatures, a little bit hard to see, that live on these -- in these hydroids and then all of the structure that is created.

One example is something called a polychaete worm, and polychaete worms -- chaete are like little legs, and so this means "many-legged worm," and so this particular worm is just -- It's got tiny little feet, almost little cilia on it, and that's what it helps to move.

These animals come in a variety of sizes.

Some of them are kind of small and some of them get quite big, but you can imagine this is great food for birds and fish and all sorts of other things, so a lot of things eat 'em, but mostly to have a place to hold on.

We've also got a couple of little crabs here.

This is -- looks like a little mud crab, possibly.

It's got black claw tips.

But what's really cool about it is this is a sponge crab, and when crabs have -- female crabs have eggs, they hold them up underneath the apron, and you can see their eggs just spilling out of this.

So these little eggs will hatch into little, tiny larval crabs, and those crabs eventually will, you know, get back on the bottom.

They're free-floating in with the tide for a while, and then they'll turn into little, tiny crabs that look like these.

But think how small the babies are.

I mean, this crab is not very big to begin with, and you can imagine what the babies are like.

And so all these are eggs.

And potentially any one of these could form into an adult crab one day.

It's just amazing how much stuff is alive.

It's not so much living in the water column, but anytime you get any kind of structure, you're going to see a lot of neat things attached to that structure.

Man, we have some really cool stuff here.

We've got a bunch of sea squirts, and you see how these guys spray water, and these things live in the marsh, they're very common, and once again they're going to colonize any structure that they run into, and they have a way of sort of taking in water, pulling all sorts of small creatures and small particles out of it, and they're passing the water back through their systems.

A lot of these organisms actually help to clean the water and take a lot of things out of it.

But they -- you can imagine this on the bottom of a boat or something, and some people call this dock fouling, because this stuff, it grows on the bottom of docks and causes some real problems.

There's some other stuff here.

There's some really cool red beard sponge, and that's what this stuff is, and this is a true sponge, a prolifera, and this generally is down deeper in the water column.

Probably doesn't require as much light, and it could be that the salinities stay higher down deeper in the river.

We also have some garlic sponge here.

Think I saw some.

And this stuff smells a little bit garlic, and that's where it gets its name.

Now, one of the things that's interesting is this is stuff that's associated with high salinities.

We get salinities of almost what open ocean water is.

You know, 33, sometimes, parts per thousand, so this is stuff that likes high salinities.

During times of lots of rainfall, a lot of this stuff will die.

And, of course, it recolonizes when it gets a chance, but in a lot of ways, a lot of fresh water running into into the marsh can poison the marsh, so it's something we need to keep in mind in terms of roads and impervious surfaces and things like that.

So there's some things that we can do to protect our marshes.

One thing we can do is be very careful about the chemicals that we use in our yards in terms of herbicides and insecticides and things and make sure we use only the recommended amount.

The other thing that we can do is we can create buffers, areas between our yards and the marsh itself.

These buffers are made up of shrubs and trees and grasses, things that will help to filter out some of the chemicals that we use in our yards.

So this is the salt marsh, an area of great beauty, the nursery for our oceans, and the whole system is driven by this one plant -- saltmarsh cordgrass, or spartina grass.

Thanks for joining us on "Coastal Kingdom."