Horseshoe crab spawning season is nearly here!
For the last several years, the East Hampton Trustees have participated in the annual spawning event in an effort to help collect data for Cornell Cooperative Extension / Marine Program. Horseshoe crabs begin their mating season in May and go to July.
Data collected includes spawning abundance, size, sex, and tag returns around the full and new moon events. Monitoring spawning horseshoe crabs is conducted throughout Long Island beaches. The Trustees will focus on our East Hampton town beaches as we have since we began our volunteer “citizen scientist” efforts for the program. This will be the sixth season that the Trustees have contributed to the data collection.
Acquiring data will provide the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) with important information about the status of horseshoe crabs in the state’s marine district and assist with the management and conservation of these living fossils that have managed to survive through five extinction periods.
We’re looking forward to another interesting and educational season and will keep you posted!
Fun Facts About Horseshoe Crabs!
Fossils of horseshoe crabs have been dated at 445 million years old. They evolved in the shallow seas of the Paleozoic Era (540-248 million years ago) with other primitive arthropods called trilobites, a long-extinct close relative of the horseshoe crab.
Horseshoe crabs are “living fossils” meaning they have existed nearly unchanged for at least 445 million years, well before even dinosaurs existed. Horseshoe crabs are not actually crabs at all, they are much more closely related to spiders and other arachnids than they are to crabs or lobsters!
