Plumb Beach
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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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Seaside Dragonlet
This is a female Seaside Dragonlet (Erythrodiplax berenice), spotted recently on Plumb Beach. This is the only American species of dragonfly that breeds in salt water, in this case probably the saltwater marsh tucked behind the beach. To be honest, I couldn’t see any of the handsome orange and black patterning on the abdomen and…
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On Plumb Beach
Plumb Beach is off the Belt Parkway between Sheepshead Bay and Flatbush Avenue. The Parks Dept.’s website calls it Plumb; Parks Dept. signs on site call it Plum; it is supposed to be named after Beach Plums (Prunus maritima). It has a unexpected history, although perhaps not for Brooklyn’s wild edges, capped more recently by…
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Tomorrow’s Beach
Masses of these tiny clams were on their way to becoming Plumb Beach.
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Beach-combing
I could spend the rest of my life beach-combing. You never know what will turn up. Previous discoveries have included an enormous leatherback turtle and a piece of whale vertebrae, although, admittedly, neither of these was in the New York Bight/Hudson River estuary system region. This small fish was. I found it, quite desiccated, on…
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Horseshoe Crabs
I wrote about the Atlantic horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus last week, before I got a chance to head out to the city shore to look for some this year. So that was theory, this is practice, at Plumb Beach. And practice can be hands-on. If you should happen to see a horseshoe crab wrong-side up…
Backyard and Beyond 