#delaware bay

[horseshoecrabfan]

OMG ZE FRANK MADE A HORSESHOE CRAB VIDEO!!!!!!!!!!!

[blackbirdcreek]

[swainathan]

Horseshoe Crab Mugs

All of these are available on my site here!

[aisling-saoirse]

Tangled High Marsh Grasses - September 17th 2023

[lighthouses-click]

Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse, Delaware Bay, Bowers Beach, Delaware, September 2023

[p0ttedplant]

rainstorm on the bay

[dendroica]

The Shorebirds of Delaware Bay Are Going Hungry - The New York Times

One of them, the red knot, has been listed as a threatened species. Since 2000, red knot numbers have plunged as low as 10,000 in some years, around one-ninth of the level in the 1980s. At the moment, the population hovers at about 30,000, still too low to be sustainable, conservationists claim.

Additional challenges like severe Arctic weather during breeding, or coastal development along the migration route, could lead to the bird’s extinction. Populations of other migratory shorebirds, like semipalmated sandpipers and ruddy turnstones, have also declined.

The problem, conservationists say, is the overfishing of horseshoe crabs for commercial fishery bait and the harvesting of the animals for their blood, which contains an extract called L.A.L., used by the biomedical industry to detect certain bacteria.

Now, conservationists are renewing calls to halt the harvest for bait altogether, and to persuade the biomedical industry to switch to recombinant Factor C (rFC), a synthetic alternative to LAL, to ease pressure on the horseshoe crab population.

“The only responsible thing to do here is a moratorium,” said Eric Stiles, president of New Jersey Audubon, an environmental group leading the initiative.

Recognizing the threat to the birds, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, an interstate regulator, banned the harvest of female horseshoe crabs for bait starting in 2013, in the hope that a recovering population of females would lay more eggs and allow the birds to rebound.

While the commission maintains there has been an increase in the number of crabs since the ban, neither the crabs nor the red knot have recovered to the levels seen before the fishing industry’s unprecedented removal of the crabs from the bay in the 1990s.

The commission’s critics blame poor enforcement of the ban and the continued harvest of thousands of crabs for bleeding, which is estimated to kill at least 15 percent of them and may prevent the survivors from reproducing.

Crabs taken for bleeding are not included in the commission’s quotas, and their numbers and mortality rates are not published because the companies that collect the blood want the figures kept confidential.

Conservation groups are urging officials in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia — three bay states that use crab quotas — to ban the horseshoe crab harvest until there’s a full recovery of both crabs and birds. (New Jersey, the other state bordering the bay, imposed a moratorium in 2008.)

[celestialphotography]

Sunrise on the wing