Dear Team,
I pray you are all healthy and safe in your home. We will miss those if you can’t come but I hope you will keep it open for next year.
This year we will probably have about a 12 person trapping team, plus 3 people working on eggs and two people working on resightings, and the sixth person working for Joanna conducting modest research of the stewardship project. So the team this year includes Stephani, Alindi, Charles, Ren, Susan Moody, the resighting team is Meghan Kolk, Faith Zerbe, and Riley Chenoweth Hafner, the Egg team is Katherine Michell and Susan Linder. and Joanna’s tech Grace. We are renting three houses to keep people at safe distances, although all are vaccinated.
There have been a number of changes to the bay sure and I will work so just list some in bullet form
- Working with the American Littoral Society and Wildlife Restoration Partnerships ( Stephanie and I) have erected Sand berms in five locations that winter storms have either worsened breeches or create a new one on Kimbles Beach and pierces point. We closed the breach at Reeds that you may remember us rescuing 5000 crabs with a bucket brigade in 2017. The winter has not been kind to the Bayshore. The complete lack of any ice or snow and the normal ferocious winds from the west and NW have left most of the beach damaged. Pierces was hit hard. We have funding to redo Pierces next year and Fortescue but that won’t take place until next winter.
American Littoral Society erected sand berms to prevent horseshoe crabs from being pushed into the marsh behind the dunes through breaches created by storm waves.
- I’d like you all to visit a new website for horseshoe crab recovery coalition. David Mizrahi and I began this two years ago and it has blossomed into a 30 group coalition including national wildlife and national Audubon, Physicians for responsible medicine, and corporations like Eli Lily. The group is dedicated to ending the killing of horseshoe crabs in various ways. This year we are instituting the first Atlantic coast-wide survey of horseshoe crabs.
- The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation has funded us once again and the plan is to continue until 2028. The Foundation has guided our project through more focused metrics that include Horseshoe crab egg densities, an objective measure of the stopover that preceded the overharvest of crabs and thus provide a better comparison than many of the metrics chosen by the Atlantic States Marine Fishery Commission which chose all its metrics to start after the overharvest thus biasing the assessment.
- The condition of the Horsehoe crab population is uncertain. The agencies suggest without good evidence that numbers are going up but any reasonable judgment based on the data suggests otherwise. The bay trawl done by state of Delaware shows promise though and so I am hoping for more crabs this year but prepared for the same.
A page from the “Draft Report to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission Horseshoe Crab and Delaware Bay Ecology Technical Committees” showing the status of adult and immature male and female horseshoe crabs as determined from a trawl offshore of the mouth of Delaware Bay. The report by Rujia Bi, David Hata and Eric Hallerman of Department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at VPI. . Numbers fell in 2019.
- So far the weather was cooperating with a warm spell that brought bay water temperatures up to the threshold for spawning at 59° (15° for you foreigners). But it is since dropped to below 57. let’s hope for warmer weather. There was some spawning but not many eggs yet
- Similarly, the red knot population is uncertain. The counts done in Terra del Fuego remains similar to last year but with new observers. The count in Lagoa do Piexe in southern Brazil, was far below last year and is the count done in San Antonio Estes, Argentina. So the data is mixed. As of this morning, there are about 500 knots in the bay, 400 knots were at Cooks this morning.
- We have purchased new equipment. We have a new ATV that we purchased last fall and a new storage trailer that allows us to work inside if necessary. We are renting three houses again this year but you all will be happy to know that thanks to Stephanie, we have rented three for next year, a first!
We will begin trapping on Thursday I will keep you informed of the progress during the season. I missed some people last year inadvertently, let me know if you see someone missing that might want to know. Feel free to add your two cents, miss you all. Larry
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