South Carolina Electric and Gas hosted Vance Elementary School at the unveiling of the SCE&G Outdoor Classroom at the Audubon Center at Francis Beidler Forest. Scana also sponsors the after-school program at Vance Elementary School. Students created food chains and ultimately a complex food web by placing their individual magnets, which held images of various plants or animals, onto the magnetic white board in the outdoor classroom. Although the majority of the students indicated that they did not like snakes, they discovered that the food web would quickly move out of balance if all the snakes were removed. They learned that the same was true if a majority of the plants were removed or the habitat otherwise altered.
After the lesson in the classroom, the students moved out into the swamp to look for relationships between plants and animals and to indentify examples of animal needs (food, water, shelter and space). The highly-observant students spotted woodpecker holes, nests, capterpillar-chewed leaves, spider webs, deer tracks, a hunting cottonmouth, and two fighting Carolina Anoles (Anolis carolinensis) (see image).
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