Truly an unusual event as participants in the Crab Field School discovered a large green crab camouflaged under an extended old blook ark shell. This crab found the perfect disguise for Halloween in the Land of Ooze.
Green Crab Hides under Blood Ark Shell
Male Fiddler Crab
Two days of bright sunshine baked the Land of Ooze, and its mud flats have begun to spring to life. True, these critters aren’t turtles. But they do live in the marsh creeks, they burrow under the mud for winter, and they are an imminent precursor of our beloved terrapins.
Water temperatures, even early this morning, had reached 52 degrees Fahrenheit. Fiddler crabs sprang from the ooze, muddy mounds surrounding escape tunnels.
Male Fiddler Crabs
They haven’t begun to march in armies yet, but they have emerged and that’s a welcomed harbinger of things to come. Even in the grassy marsh, fiddlers are on the move.
Springtime Duets
And it is springtime, so it shouldn’t surprise us that all God’s creatures seem to prefer a two-seater rather than flying solo.
 Sea Stars on Wellfleet’s Atlantic Beach
 Today’s ocean tide brought hopeful signs for the New Year.
 
For when you wish upon a star, your dreams really do come true — in the Land of Ooze.
If it’s the unexpected that keeps naturalists energized when conditions would dictate a good book and a raging fire, then I guess I hit jackpot this afternoon. Temperatures hung in the twenties with sustained 25-knot winds whipping across the bay from the northwest. The wind chill plunged to zero and below, and several feet of slush ice had formed at the intersection of the channel and the shore. The last thing I would expect to encounter, other than a stone-cold terrapin of course, would be a live horseshoe crab. Yet, here was an adult male, sporting a decorative colony of parasite shellfish and burrowed into the low tide exposed beach off Lieutenant Island’s north shore.
Live, Exposed Horseshoe Crab in Sub-Freezing Temperature
Last season began an important research program on the Cape to formally study our native horseshoe crab population. In the face of substantial harvesting of these critters for biomedical purposes, as well as for conch and other fishing bait, we felt obliged to nail down some concrete data to underpin any future policy changes. As part of this project, nearly a thousand adults were tagged to study migration and behavior and physiology, and to obtain a rough population estimate through capture-mark-recapture efforts over a number of years.
As I patrol wrack-strewn beaches and marshes in the study area, I routinely examine molted shells and horseshoe crab remains, which wash ashore with the tides, to see if they are marked or not. So, this afternoon at dead low tide as I walked the shoreline and spotted a horseshoe crab shell, I stopped to check it. I realized at once that this one was quiet alive and had dug itself into the beach sand about two feet from the receding tide line. I flipped the crab over to determine gender and its reactions were anything but sluggish. It seemed to move as normally as in the summer. I saw that he had the telltale “boxing glove†clasper at right front, but the end of the left “boxing glove†appendage was missing. On his back, the tail immediately went into action to right himself. I saved him the trouble and returned him to his repose, reburying his shell with moist beach sand.
Male Horseshoe Crab with “Boxing Gloves”
What the heck a horseshoe crab was doing out of his hibernacula in these conditions is beyond my ken. But it’s these little surprises that keeps us outside our winter hibernacula, too.
December Brewster Beach at Sunset
Sunset and high tide converged last night in an explosion of symphonic colors as we patrolled Brewster beaches in search of cold-stunned sea turtles.
63-Pound Juvenile Loggerhead Victim of Shark Attack
At Saints Landing the largest turtle of the season to date came ashore: a loggerhead weighing 63 pounds and measuring nearly 55 centimeters carapace length. This critter — with a missing right rear flipper and a 26-centimeter bite ripped out of its right rear quadrant — had been the victim of a shark attack.
Large Shark Tooth Clearly Visible in Notched Shell
Close inspection of the wound clearly shows the outline of the shark’s tooth notched in the shell. From the extent of healing and parasites, such as mussels growing in the wound, we can deduce that the turtle survived the shark strike that occurred at least some time in the past. Unfortunately, exacerbated by cold-stunning, which dropped its internal body temperature to 39.4°F, this loggerhead did not live through the night.
Three dead Kemp’s ridley sea turtles came ashore this morning on Brewster beaches. They all measured around 31 centimeters carapace length and weighed a little over 4 kilograms. Totals as of this morning are 30 ridleys and two loggerheads for the fall stranding season.