For years, people speculated about how the armadillo got onto the Sea Islands in the Lowcountry. A popular myth was that armadillos couldn’t swim, they simply sank and walked on the bottom to get where they were going. Well, as popular as that old wive’s tale has gotten, just think about that. How would the armadillo breath? If he couldn’t swim, how could he hold his breath long enough to walk underwater from, say, Bluffton to Hilton Head or Hilton Head to Daufuskie Island? Well, truth is, armadillos are actually quite good at swimming. Air gets trapped under their hard armor plating and gives them extra buoyancy in the water, and they just dog-paddle to their destination.
So, armadillos colonize new areas by not only swimming to barrier islands, but with more and more bridges reaching these places, sometimes they do like we do and just take the bridge! For years, people speculated about how the armadillo got onto the Sea Islands in the Lowcountry. A popular myth was that armadillos couldn’t swim, they simply sank and walked on the bottom to get where they were going. Well, as popular as that old wive’s tale has gotten, just think about that. How would the armadillo breath? If he couldn’t swim, how could he hold his breath long enough to walk underwater from, say, Bluffton to Hilton Head or Hilton Head to Daufuskie Island? Well, truth is, armadillos are actually quite good at swimming. Air gets trapped under their hard armor plating and gives them extra buoyancy in the water, and they just dog-paddle to their destination.
So, armadillos colonize new areas by not only swimming to barrier islands, but with more and more bridges reaching these places, sometimes they do like we do and just take the bridge!