By Laura Lance
September 7, 2025

For anyone who might have traveled within a mile of USCA in late August on either Trolley Line Road or the Robert M. Bell Parkway and was hit with an unbearable, foul odor of something rotten, that was the smell of a pond and wetland habitat behind the Convocation Center. The pond and nearby vegetation had recently been plowed under and covered over by massive earth-moving equipment.  The myriad frogs, toads, turtles, snakes and wetland plants that called the pond home were smothered into an anaerobic stew of death, creating a stench so powerful that it could be smelled a mile away. 

So what kind of pond was this? Why was it there? How long had it been there?

Long enough to draw a diverse community of flora and fauna. My granddaughter spent many hours this summer visiting the pond and the nearby longleaf forest, whose paths she’s been exploring since she was eight.

ABOVE: A familiar path through the nearby longleaf forest in 2017.
BELOW: A patch of woods destroyed above the pond earlier this summer.

Over the summer, she watched as the cattails emerged from the boggy margin on the north end of the pond. She watched as the tadpoles grew into toads and into the large frogs who poked their heads above the water and watched her as she explored along the shore. She observed the day-to-day economies of the numerous birds, reptiles, amphibians, wetland plants, spiders and insects that relied on this serendipitous little ecosystem — an incidental pond formed, perhaps, during an earlier phase of development on this landscape.

My granddaughter’s primary interest was in studying the harvester ants who have likely always occupied this land, and have occupied her interest since the age of four. She already understood their days were numbered. She’d already witnessed acre after acre of longleaf forest and its native inhabitants destroyed along the Trolleyline corridor in recent years. All the more urgency to study them and appreciate these native communities before the developer’s maw rolled in to consume them.

ABOVE: The harvester ants carrying a few of the seeds (millet, sunflower and staghorn sumac) that were brought to them to learn more about their preferences.

From a legal standpoint, there were probably no laws broken — or, at least, no laws that anyone would be inclined to enforce. It is illegal, for instance, to kill snakes on public property in South Carolina without a permit. Perhaps the killing was permitted, but even if it weren’t, it’d take a team of lawyers and activists to produce the evidence and enforce the $200 fine for breaking that law.

It would have been likewise illegal for the driver of the earth-moving machinery to hop into a car and transport one of those frogs across the state line for sale in Augusta — but not against the law to plow under and bury alive an entire community of snakes, turtles, frogs, toads, lizards, ants, catails and numerous other wetland plants.

A sampling of the daily animal tracks left in the sandy path near the pond.

My point here is not about laws, but about the ethics. My granddaughter well understands the pragmatics of land use; she understands how most of Aiken County’s “undeveloped” lands are but a breath away from becoming “developed” lands, their trees and sometimes extraordinary understory habitats destroyed by one fell swoop after another. She was well aware that the clock was ticking for this pond and its inhabitants. What she wasn’t prepared for was the violent end they’d meet. 

From an ethical standpoint, this was wrong. It was just as wrong as it would be to toss gunny sacks full of puppies or box turtles into a pond. I am not here to say how the situation at the pond off Trolleyline should have been handled; only to state that it was grossly wrong and to hope that —- since there are apparently no laws against displacing and sometimes killing wildlife in the course of development — by putting these words to paper, it might foster a greater consciousness toward the ethics of our relationships with the natural world.

The pond, before and after.

Correction: The last paragraph has been edited to say “displacing and sometimes killing wildlife in the course of development.”