♪♪ >> TONY: [ Laughs ] You can see -- 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.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Oh, here's a bunch of neat stuff.

So, this is one of the mud crabs.

Not exactly sure what species this is.

I'm wearing gloves to protect myself from oysters, not from the mud crab, although these guys can give you a pretty good pinch.

Now, mud crabs hide.

Yeah, they spend most of their time underneath rocks and things like this.

And that's why I like to flip rocks, 'cause you see all kinds of really cool things.

Hiding protects animals like this from all kinds of predators -- otters, mink, things like that, birds.

Also, it allows you to avoid extremes in temperature.

And, in this case, keeps a mud crab like this from drying out.

And a lot of the animals that live here would belong to a group we would call hidden biodiversity.

They're actually pretty common but not often seen.

Let's take a look at some of the hidden biodiversity right here in the Low Country.

♪♪ ♪♪ Man, there are little baby toads everywhere through here.

I mean, these are little guys, because toads metamorphose at a really, really small size.

And they do so in great numbers.

So, other species of frogs and toads may have fewer young but bigger sizes.

These guys have tons of them.

And the whole idea is, if you have a lot of babies, even though a lot of them get eaten by predators and even though they're very small, some of them are bound to survive.

Man, they are everywhere in here, and here's a little guy right here.

So sometimes there's an advantage to being really, really small.

I mean, this toad probably just metamorphosed from a tadpole into this little toadlet.

And, man, talk about small.

And I don't want to pick this guy up, because I'm afraid I might hurt him in the process.

But, so, these are baby southern toads.

So as adults, the males get about this long, females just a little bit bigger.

I'm pretty sure where they came from.

There's a nice little wetland kind of right around the corner here.

Let's go walk around there and see what we can find.

♪♪ So, this is a freshwater wetland, and you can tell by the vegetation.

This canna is particularly good for lots of things.

You can see flies and all kinds of wasps and bees buzzing around it and lots of dragonflies, too.

But there's a couple specific things I'm looking for in this canna.

Here's one of them right here.

Caught him.

And so, this is a little green anole, a little guy.

Only about half grown, so as an adult, if it's a male, it'll have a pretty pink throat fan, but I think this is a little female, it looks like.

This, of course, is feeding on all kinds of insects and little spiders and things that it catches in this canna.

Perfect camouflage.

I mean, blends in beautifully with these green leaves.

And if you look right here, there's a pondhawk, which is a really neat dragonfly.

The males and females are different colors.

Females are green.

The males are blue.

And did.

And you can see, dragonflies are fabulous.

I mean, when you think about it, they have these huge eyes.

They hunt primarily on the wing.

So what they're doing is flying around, looking for things at all times, catching other dragonflies, mosquitoes, all kinds of flying insects, and then feeding on them.

And as I said, sometimes on the wing.

They're spectacular fliers and very athletic.

So, we can let this guy fly off.

♪♪ Man, there's stuff just hopping everywhere.

Dragonflies buzzing around and tree frogs and green anoles hopping.

See if I can get him off this leaf.

Okay, so here's a tree frog.

And this is a little green tree -- Actually, this is a little squirrel tree frog.

So there's two common species here.

There's one called a green tree frog, and the line goes all the way down the body.

And then there's another one called a squirrel tree frog.

Looks very, very similar.

Both green.

And they blend in beautifully in these canna leaves.

Now, these guys have the ability to change color a little bit, so they can go from kind of a green to brown.

It looks like this one's darkened up a little bit.

The other thing is, these tree frogs have toe pads, little toe disks that allow them to stick to leaves and things like that.

Make them very good climbers.

It's probably going to jump, but... ♪♪ ♪♪ Let's work back over this way.

I think I may have found something that I really wanted to see here.

So, if you look at these leaves, they have some very characteristic markings on them, and that's feeding from caterpillars.

And I'll bet you it's from a Brazilian skipper, because this is kind of what they -- What they typically do is make these cuts in a leaf.

And then, a lot of times, they'll fold it over and then adhere it together kind of with silk.

So I'm going to look around, see if I can find one.

Here's one right here.

So, if we open this up -- And this leaf, it's almost as though it's been glued together.

I mean, it's really, really tight.

And sure enough, yep, that's what it is -- a Brazilian skipper.

I was actually lucky enough to see this in my own backyard.

I have some cannas in my backyard.

And I opened one of these leaves to look at one of these caterpillars, and it closed the leaf back.

And what it did is it used silk, and it continually shortened the silk until it pulled the two leaf halves together, almost like a sandwich, which, of course, creates a little refugia and protects it from all kinds of predators, like wasps, birds, all kinds of things that might eat them.

And the best way to protect yourself sometimes is to stay hidden.

So, this larvae, it's very impressive.

I mean, they grow to almost three inches long.

But they turn into kind of a medium-size butterfly called a Brazilian skipper.

And skippers are butterflies that move around very quickly.

They almost look a little bit like moths, but they are true butterflies.

One of the really cool things about Brazilian skippers is that since they live in this tube, they have the ability to expel fecal pellets, frass, caterpillar droppings, whatever you want to call it.

So, they can fire it out the back of this little tube.

And one of the real advantages to that is that predators may have more trouble finding them because they can't find the droppings.

I'm going to pull this guy out.

He can -- Want you to see how big this larvae actually is.

He's got some silk on him.

He's kind of a meaty caterpillar.

So this one looks like it's getting pretty close to metamorphosing.

So eventually what it will do is crawl into a leaf and seal it up really tight and then form a chrysalis of sorts.

And then after a couple weeks or so, it'll emerge as a butterfly, just like a lot of other caterpillars do.

But characteristic of the skippers is this little round head.

It's sort of a thick-bodied caterpillar.

Tell you what's really cool about this caterpillar is I can look at it closely, and it's very clear and translucent.

And I can actually see the leaves that it's been eating inside its body.

Really neat little caterpillar.

Now, obviously, these guys really chew up canna.

And if you have canna in your yard, you may see some damage from them.

But other than that, they pose no real danger to anybody or anything.

And, of course, they're good food for birds and other things.

So I'm going to let this little guy go.

I'll tell you what I love about stuff like this.

I mean, you walk through an area like this and all these plants and all this life around, and this is something, unless you knew exactly how to look for it, you would never see it.

Great example of hidden biodiversity -- things that are here but very well-hidden and not apparent to most people.

There's a species of animal that lives in this field that's actually quite common, and you see the adults often.

But one thing you never see is the babies.

Now, we were lucky enough to hatch out 14 baby legless lizards, Eastern glass lizards, in the nature center.

In fact, the mom came from right here, and she was gravid -- full of eggs.

And they hatched out.

And they are so cool-looking.

So, a glass lizard, or legless lizard, is truly a lizard.

It's shaped like a snake, but it has external ear openings, and it has eyelids -- two things that snakes just don't have.

Snakes don't have eyelids.

They have a clear scale over the eye.

The other thing that differentiates legless lizards from snakes is they have the ability to lose the tail and regrow it.

So if you handle one roughly -- and we'll be very careful with these little guys -- the tail might break off and then regenerate in time.

So one of the things that we're going to do is release them right here, because that's where the adult came from.

And I'll tell you what, I've never seen a baby in the wild.

I've only seen them after they hatched out of an egg.

So I think we're going to put them down here and they're just going to disappear.

And I'm pretty sure we're never going to see them again.

By the way, this is great habitat, not only for legless lizards, but all kinds of bird species and small mammals and snakes and things like that.

Got a lot of sort of open area.

Sunlight can get down, take care of these early successional species and grasses and things.

It's a good habitat and a good place for these little guys to live.

So let's let them go.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Guys, we got a real treat for you today.

We have Mark Mills, who is here from Missouri Western, and we also have Tracey Tuberville, who is here from Savannah River Ecology Lab.

We're going to get out on the river and have some fun today.

>> MARK: Oh, man, this is just like old times, Tony.

It's going to bring back great memories.

And I hope we see some snakes today.

>> TUBERVILLE: Actually, as a graduate student, when we were graduate students together, I went out on the river with you the first time and caught brown water snakes.

>> TONY: And I caught a lot of water snakes with you guys, too.

>> MARK: Well, a few.

>> TONY: And, Tracey, you still have research going here, right?

>> TUBERVILLE: Yes.

I'm a faculty member at the University of Georgia's Savannah Ecology Lab, and we're interested in what we call long-lived reptiles.

One of the things that we look at is their exposure to an accumulation of contaminants and whether that has negative effects on their physiology and biology.

>> MARK: Yeah, and back when we were working in the '90s, we were just trying to get basic life-history data on these, basic ecology.

Even though this is a common snake in the Savannah River and throughout the Southeast, we just didn't know that much about it.

And so, we wanted to get just basic data on where do they go, how far do they move, reproduction.

And so, now they're building on that with this idea of what kind of toxins they might have in their system.

>> TONY: And I know there's a lot of science involved, but it was really fun to catch snakes.

>> MARK: It was fun.

Yeah, I can't lie.

It was a lot of fun.

>> TONY: Tracey, you have a graduate student working out here, right?

>> TUBERVILLE: I do, and today we're going to go out on the river, help him collect snakes, and collect some data.

>> TONY: Well, let's go.

>> TUBERVILLE: David Haskins, meet Tony Mills.

>> TONY: David, good to meet you.

>> HASKINS: Good to meet you, Tony.

>> TONY: What are we going to do today?

>> HASKINS: We're going to be going out along the Savannah River and trying to catch us some brown water snakes.

>> TUBERVILLE: We have two boats today.

We're going to move up and down the river, scanning emergent logs, looking for basking snakes to catch and bring back to the boat.

>> TONY: I'd love to do that.

It's going to be fun.

♪♪ ♪♪ Okay, so, what we're going to do is we're going to drive along the river, and we're going to look for snakes along the edge.

And then when we see one, we're going to go past it, then we're going to slip out of the boat and float down just with our head above the surface of the water.

And then, if we can, reach over and grab the snakes off limbs or off the bank or however we can catch them.

We got him.

Man, this water is cold.

I'll tell you that.

David, would you take the snake?

>> HASKINS: Yeah, of course.

>> TONY: Man, the current is stronger than I thought it was/ >> HASKINS: Oh, yeah.

>> TONY: Okay, so we got to work this guy up.

>> HASKINS: This is a great-looking snake.

>> MARK: Yeah, it is.

So, this is one of those snakes, you know, not everybody likes a water snake.

They bite, they smell.

But I think they're a really cool snake for a lot of reasons.

I mean, and one of them is that, while they may be one of the more aquatic of the water snakes that lives around here, they're also the most arboreal.

And by that, I mean you can find them up in these trees along the river, you know, 12, 15 feet above the water.

And we might see some today that high.

>> TONY: David, what do you find that these guys are eating, mostly?

>> HASKINS: A lot of Mark's research, back in the '90s, found that these guys typically eat a lot of catfish.

And it's really impressive.

They'll eat fish that are up to a third of their body weight.

And you'll even see spines coming out of these guys when you catch them.

>> TONY: This one's got a pretty good hole in it.

>> HASKINS: He's got a nice little scar or injury right there.

TONY: They're really cryptic.

So, we saw this guy because he was out on a limb.

But if this is, you know, in any kind of dappled sunlight or anything like that, they're pretty much invisible.

>> HASKINS: They're hard to see.

>> MARK: They're pretty much the color of that limb.

And especially if that limb has a little bit of water on it or, like you said, dappled sunlight, they're almost invisible.

>> TONY: This is a little male, right?

>> HASKINS: It's definitely a little male.

And the tail looks intact.

We usually take tail clips, so this is definitely a new individual for me, at least.

>> TONY: And females get enormous in comparison, don't they?

>> HASKINS: Oh, for sure.

Hopefully, we'll find one.

>> MARK: Much bigger than the males.

Let's mark it up.

>> HASKINS: Yeah.

>> TONY: So, what kind of information do you need to get from this animal?

>> HASKINS: The first thing we do is weigh them, measure them, and then we also see what sex they are.

And we're pretty sure this is a male, but we'll double-check anyway.

>> TUBERVILLE: One of the things we're interested in is mercury.

A couple different reasons.

We're on a public river, where people have access to it, and there are fish-consumption advisories due to mercury.

And our funding agency is really interested in brown water snakes, like we mentioned, because they eat primarily fish.

And so they could represent basically some of the risks that humans might also experience.

>> TONY: Right, and so you're taking a little bit of blood from the caudal vein in the tail there.

>> TUBERVILLE: And that kind of tells you what its recent exposure to mercury is like, its last meal.

We're also going to take a tail tip, which gives you a better idea of its long-term exposure and accumulation.

>> TONY: Cool.

>> HASKINS: One of the other things we're doing, besides monitoring contaminants, is also making blood smears for each individual we catch to give us an idea of what their white-blood-cell counts look like.

It also gives us an idea of the ability to build a reference interval of what a healthy snake or not-healthy snake might look like.

>> TONY: Baseline information.

>> HASKINS: Which is great because, like we've talked about before, it's hard to get a lot of snake samples, but these guys make it super easy.

>> TUBERVILLE: We've also taken swabs of their skin to test for snake fungal disease, which is an emerging pathogen.

And brown water snakes have been shown to be one of the most prevalent species, in terms of carriers.

>> TONY: Have you seen evidence of that fungal disease here?

>> HASKINS: These guys, when they come out, they have a lot of lesions.

Some of them -- People call it scale rot.

A lot of snakes have it.

These guys are usually loaded with lesions in the spring, but as soon as they shed them off, they look great.

They live in the water.

They live in the muck.

So it's probably something that they are adapted to deal with.

Take a quick reading.

We write that down.

>> TONY: Of course, the same thing that's in dogs and cats.

>> HASKINS: Same thing that they use at the vet clinic.

But we can use it in our snakes, and it works really well.

We've been recapturing individuals that we caught in 2017 and 2018, so it's been pretty cool.

>> TONY: Yeah, how long do these snakes live, do you think?

>> HASKINS: Mark's data showed that some of the big females live to be well over 10 years.

So it's pretty impressive for a snake so common and in such a hostile environment to live so long.

>> TONY: There's a lot of alligators that can eat them.

>> HASKINS: And birds.

>> TONY: Red-shouldered hawks.

>> HASKINS: And big herons and things like that, yeah.

>> TUBERVILLE: They move pretty far up and down the river, too.

So recapturing the same individual, even if it is alive, can be tricky.

>> TONY: You're going just right underneath the belly scale.

>> HASKINS: Yeah, right up, about a third from this vent.

>> TONY: And that's going to stay there, and so even if you catch it years later, you're still going to know who it is.

>> HASKINS: We'll know who it is.

>> TONY: Read its code.

>> TUBERVILLE: Sometimes the information just drops in your lap.

We found a freezer that was starting to fail, so we were trying to salvage all the specimens in there.

We found brown water snakes that had been sampled 30 years ago were in the freezer.

And so David has taken the tail tips from them, and he's comparing the historical levels of mercury from the same place that we're capturing them now.

>> TONY: Oh, wow.

That's really good.

>> TUBERVILLE: That is really cool.

What did you find?

>> HASKINS: We've actually found that the samples from the mid-'80s that were down near the Still Creek system, right on the Savannah River site, are three to four times higher than levels that we're measuring now.

We've reduced atmospheric pollution and mercury.

>> TONY: So it's actually the mercury in the environment, as opposed to in the animals themselves.

>> HASKINS: I think, since the '80s, we've had a lot more regulations put forward on how we actually get rid of our mercury, whether it's producing bleach or whether it's burning coal.

>> TUBERVILLE: How you can dispose of it.

>> HASKINS: Exactly.

So less is going into the river, less is going into the air, and we're seeing that in trends in our snakes, which is really cool.

>> TONY: And if you protect the animal, you have to first and foremost protect the habitat.

>> HASKINS: Exactly.

>> TONY: Alright, well, let's release this one and go see if we can find another one.

[ Engine idling ] ♪♪ ♪♪ >> MARK: Oh, nice.

>> TONY: Alright, guys, so, this is a green snake.

Not exactly what we're looking for, but Tracey saw this up in one of the limbs.

Green snakes tend to show up along streams and rivers.

But this is a particularly big one.

I'll bet it's a female.

It is.

And I think it may even have eggs in it.

Not only does it -- a couple things.

One is it feels like it may have a food item in it.

And then also, it's really heavy towards the back end.

So it may be full of eggs.

I mean, these are wonderful snakes.

They're really cryptic.

I'm really surprised Tracey saw it.

They blend in so well with foliage and leaves and vines and things like that.

It's an insectivore.

It eats primarily, well, almost all invertebrates -- spiders and, you know, grasshoppers and caterpillars and things like that.

Really neat animal.

♪♪ ♪♪ This is a great example of a relatively common species but one that you just don't see very often.

So, hidden biodiversity -- something that's here that, because it's so cryptic and because it has such good camouflage, you just don't know how many are around.

They've worked this one up, and we're ready to let it go.

Put it back in the foliage here.

And watch how it just disappears.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> TUBERVILLE: Whoo!

That water's cold!

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> MARK: There's a taxispilota.

See it?

>> TUBERVILLE: Got it.

You could hold it up.

>> HASKINS: Nice size.

>> TONY: Nice!

Good job.

Boy, that's a big one, isn't it?

>> MARK: You got it?

>> TONY: Yeah.

Wow.

>> HASKINS: That might be a recap.

♪♪ >> MARK: So, this is a really nice-sized female.

I mean, look at that.

Look at all the babies in her.

That's a beautiful snake.

>> TONY: So, how many young do you think this snake might have?

>> MARK: Great big ones can have 50.

I wouldn't say this one would have 50.

We could have 35, 40 babies.

>> TONY: Wow.

>> MARK: And they give birth to live young, so they're viviparous.

>> HASKINS: One of the really cool things about this species is that unlike other nerodia around here, their eyes seem to be a little higher up on the top of their head, and that likely has to do with them being adapted to deal with those more aerial-like predators that are going to come down and get them.

♪♪ >> MARK: Nice.

Oh, my gosh.

Look at that.

>> TUBERVILLE: [ Laughs ] >> MARK: Got it.

>> TUBERVILLE: Alright.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> HASKINS: Got this one.

♪♪ Nice.

>> TONY: Dude, I missed him!

Thought I got it.

♪♪ >> HASKINS: He's definitely got a prey on him.

>> TONY: Got him.

>> HASKINS: You got him?

Is that the same guy?

>> TONY: Yeah.

He came up.

So, this one, I missed it the first time, and I felt really bad about it, but I hung around underneath, and he came up and stuck his head out and I was able to grab him out of the water.

Fortunately, I redeemed myself.

So we have two at this spot.

♪♪ A great day out the river, huh?

>> MARK: Yeah.

>> TUBERVILLE: It was a lot of fun.

>> MARK: It's great being out here today and seeing all these snakes and getting some data.

>> TONY: I'm glad I could come along and help you guys.

I guess the last thing we need to do is just take these guys back and let them go.

There they go.

>> TUBERVILLE: They go deep.

♪♪ >> TONY: Got something really cool to show you guys.

These are baby mud snakes.

And actually, we had an adult female come into a local nature center, and while she was in captivity, she laid eggs.

And these eggs hatched just a couple of weeks ago after incubating in the lab for about two months, and they hatched into these absolutely incredible little mud snakes.

I've got two of them.

Their tails are linked.

But very vivid and shiny little guys.

And of course, these are going to grow into -- If they're females, they could get five feet long.

If they're males, they probably won't get over four.

Now, Mom was released several weeks ago, and now it's time to release these little guys.

If they aren't eaten by predators and if they get enough to eat, hopefully, they'll grow into adult mud snakes.

So I'm going to let these little guys go.

♪♪ ♪♪ You know, we are never going to see these guys again, but it is so cool to know that they're still part of our hidden biodiversity.

Thanks for joining us on "Coastal Kingdom."

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ O