horseshoe crab
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Horseshoe Moon
Horseshoe Crabs (Limulus polyphemus) mating on the shores of Jamaica Bay. It was the day after the full Moon, when the high tide lets them get farther up the beach, where they deposit their eggs.I have written much about these amazing non-crabs and how important they are to our health. I saw a headline the…
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The Narrowest Edge
“We so easily settle for the diminished world around us, a world that, in terms of the richness and abundance of plant and animal life, may be a mere 10 percent of what once was. Unaware of what we have lost, we can’t imagine what we might restore, and instead, we argue over how many…
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Life Along The Delaware Bay
I didn’t make it to the beach to witness the annual rites of spring of the Horseshoe Crabs (Limulus polyphemus). But I did manage a virtual trip with this beautiful book. Life Along The Delaware: Cape May, Gateway to a Million Shorebirds by Niles, Burger, and Dey, with photography by van de Kam, was published…
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First Horseshoe?
We approach the first anniversary of my now constant companion, the distinguishing identifiable feature of my corpus, my horseshoe crab tattoo. So I was most pleased to notice this detail in the book, Natural Histories, I reviewed in my last post. In 1590, Theodor de Bry’s opus America presented some of the first images of…
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Molts
You should be seeing the shed exoskeleton’s of Atlantic Horseshoe Crabs on our beaches now. Note how they are hollow right down to the smallest joint. As arthropods, Horseshoes must molt to grow larger: they do it about half a dozen times during their first year and then some 18 more times after that before…
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Sheepshead Bay
Ten piers, ten local creatures of the sea.
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Bait?
A Great Black-backed Gull scavenges a Horseshoe crab. This is the last full moon of the Horseshoe spawning season. Gravid females can lay tens of thousands of eggs during the season, making successive trips to shallowly bury their eggs at the high tide line. Very few of those eggs become adults. I’ve seen one estimate…
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Horseshoe Moon
Can you feel it? The Horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) sure can. It’s spawning season. Here, looking like rocks, are some males awaiting females and clusters of males attached to, and surrounding, females. Could it be their multiple optical systems, including compound eyes and UV sensors? Could it be their one hundred thousand cuticular receptors, allowing…
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Limulus Polyphemus
For my birthday, I was given the gift of a tattoo. The work was done by Robert Bonhomme when he was still at Brooklyn Tattoo. Robert told me that when he was a kid, his siblings would run around local beaches searching for shells, while he was always on the lookout for horseshoe crabs. That…
Backyard and Beyond 