Late night lovers: Thousands of horseshoe crabs spawn
Charlie Taylor’s voice carried clearly and loudly over the soft waves hitting hard shell at Tower Road south of Dewey Beach.
More than a thousand crabs were on the shore of Rehoboth Bay in the starlight to spawn during high tide, and volunteers from the Center for the Inland Bays were out to count them as part of an annual survey.
“They’ve just been doing their thing for 450 million years,” Taylor said. “We’re just new on the planet and trying to figure them out.”
Results from the survey will inform the management of horseshoe crabs for bait and for their blood, which is used in the medical industry.
As a team leader for the Tower Road site, Taylor’s style is that of a drill sergeant in rubber boots and a bucket hat — firmly shouting orders into the calm night at volunteers who’ve come to work at 1:30 a.m. It’s the latest survey time for all six sites in the bays, and it’s happening right at the peak of crab spawning season.
“We talk to our crabs here, we call them nice, and we always have high counts,” Taylor said.
Volunteers use a square meter frame to divide the shore and count crabs inside each quadrant, but the problem is with so many males competing to latch onto the larger female crab and fertilize her eggs, she can be hard to see under the pile.
“She’s in there,” Taylor said to the volunteers, looking at a pile of males.
While Taylor was concerned with moving his team efficiently down the beach, the James Farm team leader Dennis Bartow waded into the water and told volunteers fun facts about the animals — how their shells darken with age, for example.
Bartow was there to observe, but because James Farm has been seeing so many crabs, Taylor asked Bartow to demonstrate his counting method for the volunteers.
Rather than pointing and counting the shells, Bartow dug into a pile of horseshoe crabs with both hands, lifting and feeling under the sand for signs of a female and any hidden males.
This year the Inland Bays survey has changed its survey methodology to fall in line with what the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission uses, so that data from the Inland Bays and the Delaware Bay can sync up.
Based on what he has seen at James Farm and Tower Road, Bartow said this year’s count is on a path to exceed last year’s figures.
A little after 2 a.m., volunteer Kate Daney looked up at the stars from her post, holding a surveying rope. The night was almost over, but Taylor had no mercy for the volunteers.
“Our counters are slowing down, Dr. Bartow, can you give us some advice for how to speed them back up?” he said.
Bartow took over again, finishing the last 18 meters in a flash, and the night ended at 2:27 a.m. with congratulations: 1,216 males and 80 females were counted.
“And we’re still all up and smiling,” Bartow said.
Rachael Pacella is a reporter for The (Salisbury, Md.) Daily Times. Contact her at rpacella@gannett.com or 443-210-8126. Follow her on Twitter @rachaelpacella
IF YOU SPOT ONE
• If you find a horseshoe crab with a circular white tag, be sure to report it by going to www.fws.gov/crabtag.
• This year the Center for the Inland Bays will be tagging 1,000 horseshoe crabs.