Some, like Lake Waccamaw, Singletary and Jones lakes, have a natural source of water while others are dry. A cultivated Carolina bay. Another question is why the bays are home to one of the richest ecosystems in the nation. Botanists have counted as many as 30 rare plants and animals that call the bays home. Among them are endangered plants such as sarvis holly, Boykin's lobelia, awned meadow beauty and Venus' flytraps, and threatened animals such as the dwarf and tiger salamanders and gopher frogs.
Efforts are under way to preserve the Carolina bays that remain untouched.
Many have been transformed into roads, drained for agriculture, cut for timber, and many more are rimmed with subdivisions and cemeteries. A South Carolina geologist, in 1848, was the first to remark on the strange shallow depressions. It was not until the 1930s, when a Myrtle Beach developer took aerial photographs, that debate spread across the nation. The photographs came at a time when scientists were beginning to explore craters on the moon. The similarities seemed uncanny.