All posts from the 'DELAWARE BAY RESTORATION' category:
Erosion may be an act of God, but it has been made worse by the actions of people.
To achieve a bay-wide perspective on tidal marsh attributes across the Delaware Estuary, I developed a series of maps that illustrate an array of ecological components relavent to marshes. Taken together, the perspective offered by these maps can help reveal new approaches to the conservation and restoration of this landscape.
The beetle pictured above is the Histerid beetle, Baeckmanniolus dimidiatipennis. It is an important clue in an an ongoing mystery regarding the meiofauna associated with horseshoe crab eggs.
I’ve spent the last month, tide in, tide out, on Delaware Bay beaches. With the help of a great team, I’ve been monitoring horseshoe crabs, their eggs and the shorebirds eating the eggs. The work continues, but here a some photo highlights so far.
There are a lot of young horseshoe crabs in the Delaware Bay right now. It’s a big resource and we can pretty sure that birds, fish and other critters are exploiting it if they can.
There is much to learn about the interaction of the meiofauna with horseshoe crab eggs. It would stand to reason that the notoriously nutritious horseshoe crab egg would be capitalized on by the creatures living under the sand. Meiofauna drawing © Den Store Danske
Entrenching shovels are great for counting horseshoe crab egg clusters. They should also be in every zombie hunter’s toolkit.
Environmental stochasticity is “unpredictable spatiotemporal fluctuation in environmental conditions”. I think I experienced such a thing when I was caught in a hail storm on the Delaware Bay last week.
