Little Digger

The little critter seen here is surely one of nature's more inventive productions - the mole cricket. It looks like a standard issue cricket from body to tail, but sports a shovel-like head and articulated, clawed forelegs for digging, the reason behind the crested tunnels that crisscross your lawns in late summer. They are prodigious diggers, feeding on turf roots and worms, and are the bane of landscapers and golf course maintenance crews.

A mature tawny mole cricket

Although they appear all over the world, mole crickets are most common in coastal areas like ours. Only one of the three varieties encountered here is native to South Carolina; the other two are invasive and probably first arrived during the 19th century in the ballast of cargo ships from South America. These two non-native species - the southern mole cricket and the tawny mole cricket - were first detected in the late 1800's and early 1900's in port cities like Charleston, Brunswick, Georgia and Mobile, Alabama.

Mole cricket tunnels

The tawny mole cricket is the largest of the three types, at up to two-inches when mature, and is considered the most destructive, although its smaller cousins can also damage lawns and carefully tended turf. The insects develop from eggs laid by females during an early spring mating season, when males dig sound chambers with holes at the surface to amplify their mating calls. The same males and females often return to the same location to mate, which is why you may notice tunneling in the same areas of your lawn each year. The larva emerge in about three weeks, molt up to eight times during the late spring and early summer and reach the adult stage by August, when serious lawn damage begins to appear and continues into October. Cooler weather slows the activity, and by December the insects retreat to deeper soil levels to overwinter.

Fortunately, mole crickets reproduce only once a year and can be managed, if not eradicated, with a variety of insecticides applied during the late spring and early summer, before major damage occurs. And in some parts of the world, mole crickets are not viewed so negatively. In certain parts of Africa, mole crickets are considered a sign of good fortune and in drought-prone areas, as a sign of coming rain. In southeast Asia, they're considered a great delicacy, served fried over rice.

The Deep Blue Sea

Charleston and the Lowcountry have been shaped for millennia by its harbor, the foundation of the area's growth, starting with the Archaic era's First People drawn by its abundance of fish and mollusks. European colonists quickly recognized the protection and security the harbor and the mild Lowcountry climate offered, making Charleston an economic and cultural powerhouse of the colonial period and on into the 19th-century, when the Confederacy quickly grasped the importance of defending such a critical asset.

Dredging the channel

The harbor is just as critical today, generating more than $60 billion in revenue for the state through container shipping fees via the South Carolina Port Authority, which operates four container shipping terminals surrounding the harbor and two inland distribution centers. And now, Charleston boasts the deepest port on the East Coast thanks to a decade-long, $600 million dollar dredging project that deepened the port's shipping lanes from 45 to 52 feet, allowing the world's largest cargo ships to reach the terminals regardless of tide levels. Begun in 2011 and carried out by the Army Corps of Engineers, the project's last phase was completed late last year. The project's successful completion brought one of the world's largest container ships to Charleston, the MSC Rayshmi. With a draft of over 48-feet, it became the largest container ship to ever visit the port, able to pass under the soaring Ravenel Bridge and reach the Wando Welch terminal in North Charleston.

The MSC Rayshmi, the world's largest container ship

The harbor's been deepened eight times over the past two centuries, starting in the late colonial period, when the port's depth was only twelve feet. The announcement of this latest project had an immediate economic effect, even before the first dredge load was brought up from the depth. Major automobile manufacturers like BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo quickly realized how the deepened harbor would streamline their supply and distribution channels, setting in motion new manufacturing plants in the Lowcountry; Walmart built a 600-acre distribution center supplied by rail lines running from the port.

Today, one out of every ten jobs in South Carolina is directly related to activities in and around the port, as Charleston's long relationship with the sea brings new benefits to the Lowcountry.

The Gray Army

They're so ubiquitous that we hardly notice them, and when we do, we may love them or curse them, but our island clan of gray squirrels carry on in their thousands. Common throughout the eastern United States, gray squirrels were in fact first scientifically catalogued and described right here in South Carolina by a German naturalist, Johann Friedrich Gmelin, a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition who bestowed the scientific name Sciurus carolinensis on the animal. (The darker, or even black, squirrels you sometimes see are all grays with a genetic mutation affecting coat color.)

A kit at about six weeks old

Gray squirrels share with their red and fox-eared cousins a prolific breeding capability, with females as young as six months able to bear young, although most females begin mating at a year-old and produce up to four kits, sometimes twice a year for older females. First litters are born in February or March, and a second litter in June or July. The kits who, as adults, have an average life span of two years, are nursed in nests built high up in live oaks or other leafy trees before living on their own after about twelve weeks. Active in early morning and early evening, squirrels retreat to their nests in the heat of the day during warmer months.

Squirrels are scatter-hoarders, gathering and burying a diet of acorns, walnuts, tree bark and seeds raided from bird feeders over a wide area, returning to them sometimes months later through smell and by remembering landmarks associated with each horde. They have actually been observed pretending to bury a horde when they suspect a rival is watching, going through the digging and burying motions but retaining their prize in the mouth until the competitor is safely away and another site can be chosen. This has led some naturalists to speculate that squirrels have developed the "theory of mind" (an ability to attach mental states to oneself and to others) observed in other mammals like dolphins, elephants and apes. Squirrels are also one of the few mammalian arboreal species that can descend from a tree head-down, reversing the direction of their rear claws to grab hold on the trunk.

They're certainly clever, as anyone who has done battle with them over a bird feeder has discovered; in some parts of the western United States, Canada and in Europe, they're considered an invasive species who threaten native squirrels like the red squirrel. But they do play an important role in reforestation, helping forests regenerate with new seedlings and keeping nature in balance.