Last night was our first horseshoe crab count for the season. We've been doing this every year for a while. In the spring, we go out to the Waterfront Center in Oyster Bay and count horseshoe crabs. We count the lone males, lone females, mating pairs, and mating groups (generally a female with more than one male), and lone females (though there are rarely any of those). It's sort of like a Star Trek convention for arthropods. We adjust for visibility conditions, and somehow the good folks at the Cornell University Cooperative Extension take our numbers as part of a pool of data to determine...I'm not sure what. How many horseshoe crabs there are?
It was a slow night. We saw fewer than half a dozen. But later in the season is bound to be better, and we'll be seeing several dozen in an evening. Well, it is a chance to walk on the beach at night.
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