crabs
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Crabs
Atlantic Blue. Atlantic Rock. Lady. Lady in situ. Portly Spider (with barnacles, which are also crustaceans). Atlantic Sand. Note that little spur above the back paddle. All seen at Jones Beach recently. The invasive Asian Shore Crab, spotted at Dead Horse Bay.
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YCNH
Yellow-crowned Night-herons, Nyctanassa violacea, at the Salt Marsh Nature Center.“Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs” wrote Whitman in Song of Myself. The low tide here reveals fiddler crabs amongst the marsh grasses. This one grabbed a crab with some nearby seaweed, took the…
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Sand Crab
The Atlantic Sand Crab (Emerita talpoida) is also known as the mole crab and the sand flea (confusingly, since there are, in fact, amphipod sand fleas).These streamlined animals are, at any rate, crustaceans. As Sarah Oktay explains from the place I first came across them, they are surf-zone specialists, and pretty important in that harsh…
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Hermits
I believe these are Eastern Mud Snails (Ilyanassa obsoleta), which look like rocks until you look closer. There are quite a few of them in Jamaica Bay. And some of them were moving much too quickly. They were, in fact, hermit crabs, who use found snail shells for their own.Hermits don’t have protective shells like…
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Variations on Legs
Fiddler crabs in the tiny patch of ever-so-green right now salt marsh at Pier One. On the jumbly rocks next to it, a number of these spiders:I have returned from a two week trip abroad. I have a new computer. I am ready to blog again.A young New World Robin, SO different from the Old…
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Dead Horse Bay
Yellow-rumped warblers and Green Darner dragonflies before we got to the landfill edge.One of two Royal Terns, Thalasseus maximus, both with bands on their left legs. Not a commonly sighted bird in the city; I didn’t know what they were at first. The smaller Common and Little Terns we see here during summer have already…
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We’ve Got Crabs
The triangle of saltmarsh ot the southern end of Pier One at Brooklyn Bridge Park is an experiment. It’s cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora), which thrives even though it’s flooded by salt water at high tides. In flower now, it will send many seeds off on the currents, searching for mudflats. Key to its success, though, is…
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Sheepshead Bay
Ten piers, ten local creatures of the sea.
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Pelham Bay Park
“Only the dead know Brooklyn…” but you can say the same thing for the rest of NYC. Five massive boroughs: it’s a full-time job to explore them all. Last Saturday, we journeyed up to the eastern Bronx to visit Pelham Bay Park. Pharaoh — or should I say “Tyrant,” based on the Greco-design of the…
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Arthropods of St. John III
Hermit crabs range from these little guys, scavenging the back end of rocks along the shoreto the landlubbers known as “soldier crabs,” which can get up to baseball sized, shell (usually the West Indian topshell or whelk as below) included.These are the ones who swarm out of the mountains in August to mate by the…
Backyard and Beyond 