Looking For Love

The little guy above may be barely two inches across, but fiddler crabs like this mate-seeking male are an important if little noticed part of our island ecosystem. This one is a mud fiddler (Uca pugnax) who lives in the creekside mud banks at Seabrook's crabbing dock, waving his immense left claw to attract a female to his burrow. If one approaches, he'll also drum his claw or stamp his legs on the ground to keep her interested. Mating occurs inside the burrow, after which the female emerges in about two weeks to release her eggs into the water.

Fiddler crabs are one of the most common and, if you look for them, most conspicuous inhabitants of the Lowcountry's tidal inlets and intertidal zones. (Two other common types along the Atlantic seaboard are the sand fiddler and the red-jointed fiddler.) They're especially abundant at this time of year, the spring mating season. You'll see them foraging in large groups, emerging between high tides to feed from burrows that can be nearly two-feet in depth.

courtesy NOAA

The male's claw at maturity can account for 65% of its total body weight; and if he loses it in a fight with rival male, another will grow on the opposite side at the next molt and a normal-sized one will replace the lost claw. That smaller claw is used to sift mud and sand for algae, fungus and other organic matter transported to the mouth, the back-and-forth motion as if the animal's playing the fiddle of its larger claw. Once the food's been extracted, the crab will roll the remaining sediment into a ball and leave it at the mouth of its burrow to be carried away in the next high tide.

Because they're constantly sifting soil, fiddlers are considered important for aerating the ground and helping to maintain healthy soil conditions. And they're an important protein source for birds like herons and egrets, mammals such as raccoons and foxes, and even other, larger crabs like blue crabs. Keep an eye out for these diminutive but crucial inhabitants as you enjoy the creeks and tidal inlets of Seabrook, and give them a wave back!

Nesting

Some of the summer visitors we most look forward to are due to start arriving in the coming weeks. It's nesting season for loggerhead turtles, and we're fortunate to be among the north and mid-Atlantic sites favored by loggerheads. Our friends at the Seabrook Island Turle Patrol are preparing for the arrivals, with the season officially starting on May 1st and continuing through September.

Loggerheads are named for their large heads and powerful jaws that allow them to crack through the shells of crabs, whelks and conch on their carnivorous diet. Except for the brief time females dig and lay their nests, loggerheads spend all their time in the oceans and coastal waters on both sides of the Atlantic, the Pacific, and in the eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, migrating thousands of miles during their life spans, which an be up to eighty years. Females lay eggs every two to three years and return to the general area they themselves hatched from to dig their nests. On our side of the Atlantic, south Florida typically ranks each year with the highest number of nests, up to 10,000 of them in some years. The South Carolina coast averages six-thousand or so sites annually. Here on Seabrook Island, 2020 was a peak year for nesting sites, with more than ninety nests identified. Last year, tropical storm Idalia washed away many nests.

Loggerhead populations have been in decline for some years worldwide, although the NOAA recently reported that the slide seems to have slowed in some parts of the globe. Dangers to loggerheads include as fishing boat bycatch, loss of nesting habitat due to coastal development, and marine pollution and trash. That's all on top of the hazardous journey to the ocean that hatchlings must make under the watchful eyes of predators like shorebirds, coyotes and foxes. Hatchlings, who navigate from nests to the water by fixing on the brightest light of the horizon, can become disoriented by bright lighting from beachside homes and roadways, causing them to head landward instead of seaward.

You can help our loggerheads survive by observing "lights out" on the beach, taking trash away with you when you leave the beach, and filling in any holes in the sand that can trap a female turtle. Even better, join the Turtle Patrol!

Red Gold

With warming temperatures, one of Johns Island's most famous foods will begin appearing at farm stands all over the Lowcountry soon. Planting has already begun for the first tomato harvests in June, including popular heirloom varieties like Purple Cherokees and Brandywines, those huge, oddly shaped ones, which have been grown here for at least fifty years. Johns Island tomatoes are famously delicious, but what makes our tomatoes so much more delectable than the bland supermarket ones from who knows where?

One theory is the trace amounts of salt in the local water used for irrigation, which acts as a mild stressor for the plant and provokes a protective response that leads to higher than usual levels of compounds like lycopene, vitamins C and E, and certain flavonoids - all of which not only protect the fruit but make it more nutritious and flavorful. The sandy, porous Lowcountry soil plays a big part, too, helping to saturate the plant bed without trapping water too close to the roots.

Whatever the reason, our Johns Island tomatoes (and Wadmalaw Island's, too) account for the largest share of produce sales during the summer. Limehouse Produce, for example, once estimated that it sold 1.8 million pounds of local tomatoes to restaurant kitchens and produce markets in one year alone.

Although tomatoes, native to South America, were first reported under cultivation in the Carolinas in the early 17th century, they weren’t always popular with European settlers, who noted the tomato's lineage in the nightshade family and regarded them as poisonous. It wasn't until the Civil War that tomatoes proved to be an easily grown, preserved and transported food for troops in the field, starting the tomato's climb to the top of the summer menu. There's even a song about them, "Homegrown Tomatoes", which begins "Plant 'em in the spring/eat 'em in the summer/All winter without em's a culinary bummer."