From the ashes

CONWAY--The bugs never stood a chance. Insect-eating plants were waiting.

Beetles came out like plague in the cinders of the Myrtle Beach fire earlier this year. They were so thick that if you stood in the forest you could hear them eating the trees, said Deanna Ruth, S.C. Department of Natural Resources wildlife biologist.

But the scorched forest was ready for them, little more than a month after one of the worst fires in the state's history.

An astounding profusion of horror-movie-looking Venus fly traps emerged, opening their carnivorous, teethy spikes in a spectacular display of a plant so rare it grows nowhere else in the world natively. They came out in ribbons like runway carpets stretchingfor a half-mile at times along the edge of bogs in the Lewis Ocean Bay Heritage Preserve.

They were so thick biologists found six colonies they didn't know existed.

Alongside the fly traps bloomed sundews, even tinier bug-eating plants that look like something you'd see in the Hubble telescope. Pitcher plants emerged, tulip-shaped bug eaters. They bloomed with white fringed orchids and indigo in an almost fantastic reclaiming of more than 7,000 burned acres in the preserve.

And the animals came out in numbers that the biologists hadn't seen in years -- deer grazing on the tender new shoots of grasses, quail and wild turkey, whose young feed on insects.

The April blaze that consumed 30 square miles of mostly pine stands and coastal swamps, or bays, didn't kill the longleaf pine savannahs. It rejuvenated them.

"It burned. There was plenty of open daylight. (The plants) weren't being droughted out. All the conditions were perfect for these plants to come back and thrive," Ruth said. "It's pretty amazing."

The fire did $25 million damage to some 70 homes in subdivisions cut into the edges of those thick-growing, flammable wilds. Residents still are struggling to rebuild, but the woods already are recovering. And there's a lesson in that for the Lowcountry, which also is home to miles on miles of "fire adapted communities," woods and plants that evolved partly because of occasional wildfires.

"We need to make sure we burn periodically here," said botanist Richard Porcher, a professor emeritus with The Citadel. "You have a normal fire, and everything comes right back. If you don't (burn), when you do have a fire you have a holocaust."

The recovery hasn't been unaided. The nearly 10,000-acre preserve has been closed all season while logging crews tried to remove some 1,800 acres of burned trees so ruined that timber companies didn't want the wood; the majority were sent to the chippers then sold overseas. The loggers managed to cut about two-thirds of that acreage.

Natural Resources plans to re-open the preserve to the public Sept. 16. Guided tours of the fly traps are held in the spring. The plants are a state species of concern, illegal to pick in the wild, Ruth said. Cultivated fly traps can be bought in specialty shops or online.

The fly trap is the piranha of the plant world, eerie and voracious looking. But the plants are so small that Ruth had to point out to a searching preserve visitor that he's standing on them.

They are a wonder found natively only on the rims of isolated coastal wetlands in North and South Carolina, one of a number of rare plants that thrive at the edges of Carolina Bays. The bays themselves are an enigma -- oval-shaped wetlands that pock the entire coastal plain in clusters with an eerie symmetry, each turned northwest to southeast. They are thought to be as old as 100,000 years, and nobody knows how they formed.

The preserve is dominated by one of them, the 786-acre Lewis Ocean Bay. Carolina Bays extend into Georgia, but Venus fly traps are found only as far south as the Santee River.

"Why they never came across the Santee, nobody knows," Porcher said. "If you knew the answer to that you'd be a famous biologist."