by Ben Wurst, Habitat Program Manager
Northern diamondback terrapins are a coast hugging, saltmarsh living, shellfish eating, aquatic turtle. Their ultimate survival depends on the ability of adult females to safely access nesting areas during summer months. Since 2010 CWF has worked to document and reduce roadkills of terrapins on roads in southern Ocean and northern Atlantic Counties.
(more…)By Ben Wurst, CWF Habitat Restoration Manager
Ospreys have made great progress toward recovery in New Jersey, rebounding from a low of 50 nests in 1974 to 589 active nests in 2018. This progress should be celebrated, and victory can and should be declared, as The Press of Atlantic city suggested in their March 1 editorial “Maybe it’s time NJ declares victory in restoration of ospreys.”
But as a biologist who has studied ospreys for many years I also know that declaring victory doesn’t just mean we should walk away and abandon them.
Ghost pots in Barnegat Bay
By: Emily Heiser; Wildlife Biologist
Derelict fishing gear continues to plague the depths of Barnegat Bay. Often lost through storm events or due to boat traffic, lost or abandoned crab pots (ghost pots) become an unintentional deathtrap for a variety of marine species and reduce otherwise harvestable resources. CWF and their partners at MATES, Stockton, and ALS have been working to recover lost pots in Barnegat Bay since 2015.
Over the course of the last three field seasons, 1,300 crab pots have been recovered and their bycatch has been extensively documented. Notably, CWF and MATES have been focusing on how to further help northern diamondback terrapins who often find themselves caught in ghost pots. In 2016, one pot contained the remains of 17 terrapins.
As we enter the fourth field season of pot collections, the project hopes to not only recover as may pots as possible, but also to glean further information on how the pots move in a variety of substrates and under a variety conditions. To bring further awareness to the issue, CWF teamed up with the awesome folks at Citizen Racecar to produce a short informational film about ghost fishing and its effects on Barnegat Bay. Visit our Facebook page to view the video: https://www.facebook.com/wildlifenj/
A saltmarsh sparrow photographed in Delaware. Credit: Matt Tillett, creative commons.
Even if you’re not a birder, there are a lot of reasons to care about birds. There are of course their aesthetic qualities — beautiful, charming, euphonious — and their incredible feats of survival as small creatures in a big, ever-changing world.
But like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, when birds aren’t doing well it usually means their habitat is suffering in some way. And if the habitat isn’t functioning, people lose out too; on the benefits that nature provides, from clean air and water to storm defenses.
In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the Fish and Wildlife Service invested in restoring and protecting natural systems up and down the East Coast that provide important habitat for wildlife while also creating natural defenses for people. A big part of building this stronger coast is making sure that wildlife like shorebirds have the habitat they need — the marshes, beaches and dunes — to nest, feed and raise their young.
Here are stories of how restoration efforts are helping ensure a brighter future for three bird species — red knot, piping plover and saltmarsh sparrow.
Click here to read more.
by Larry Niles
Delaware Bay horseshoe crab eggs reach sufficient levels to give red knots and other shorebirds a good start on the fat they need to fuel the last leg of their yearly journey in the first week of the stopover ( May 12-19). Knots need at least 180 grams to fly to the Arctic and breed successfully. This week we caught birds that weighed 93 grams which is 30 grams below fat-free weight. These birds had just arrived from a long flight, probably from Tierra del Fuego, Chile or Maranhão, Brazil. In the same catch, we weighed red knots as high as 176 grams or only 5 grams from the 180-gram threshold. These birds are probably from Florida or the Caribbean wintering areas and so arrive earlier, resulting in them having more time to gain weight. All together it looks like a normal early migration and a modest horseshoe crab spawn, just barely enough for the birds in the bay.
Our team prepares a catch of knots turnstones and semipalmated sandpipers for extraction to keeping cages. The birds will be covered to prevent feather abrasion before extraction (Photo by Stephanie Feigin)
However, we are still short of about half the population. Our bay wide count won’t take place until next week on May 22 and 26. At this point it looks like we have about 14,000 knots in the bay, of which 8,000 are in New Jersey. In the last 5 years we have had a bay wide population of about 24,000 red knots. The situation is similar for ruddy turnstones and sanderlings. The southernly winds of the next few days will almost certainly bring in the rest of the flock by mid-week.
The condition of the stopover is mixed.
The work of Niles & Smith Conservation Services, Conserve Wildlife Foundation of NJ, and American Littoral Society continues to supply high-quality habitat for horseshoe crabs. We have developed an efficient system for maintaining the essential requirements of a good spawning beach, deep and large grain sand with berm heights that prevent over washing in a way that keeps cost down. First, by creating low oyster reefs to break waves in lower tides, thus protecting beaches from wind waves at low and mid tides. Second, by placing sand on beaches that typically erode fast losing sands to adjacent creek inlets and the next beach south. This way we can use one restoration to restore three different places. For example, Cooks Beach loses sand to South Reeds.
Thompsons beach before and after restoration by American Littoral Society and partners. (Photo by Larry Niles)
Oddly these successes may be contributing to the next big problem for the birds. The state of Delaware has been carrying out much larger scale beach replenishment projects that have added significant new sandy beach for crabs spawning. At the same time the Atlantic States Marine Fish Commission has failed to deliver on its promise to increase the number of crabs. The population is still 1/3 below carrying capacity or the number that existed 20 years ago. The same number of crab divided by more beach equals decreasing crab densities. Decreasing densities means fewer eggs reaching the surface because crabs are not digging up existing eggs to lay their own.
In other words, we need more crabs.
But the resource agencies seem perfectly happy to keep killing adult crabs for both bait and bleeding at near historically high numbers. Bait harvests recorded as coming from the bay have stayed the same, however other states such as NY are still taking and landing large numbers of crabs despite having no known crab historic population of their own. Additionally, Virginia states that a crab population still exists in the state, even though most field biologists consider them lost. The truth is they are very likely taking Delaware Bay crabs and landing them as their own.
The Conservation groups are no longer satisfied with this loose regulation and are calling for regulations similar to those used for Striped Bass. The Delaware Bay harvest should be restricted to just the quota agreed upon by everyone through the Adaptive Resource Management system. All other landed crabs should be genetically linked to a source population, and if they do in fact come from Delaware Bay they should be taken out of the ARM quota. No one should be allowed to get away with killing our crabs outside the quota.
Or just stop the senseless killing of these valuable animals as bait for the dying couch fishery.
This graph compares the finding of Botton et al 1994 from horsesoe crab egg surveys done in 1990 and recent counts done in 2017
The same goes for the killing of crabs by the companies bleeding crabs. The industry makes untold millions (the numbers are hidden from the public) but does virtually nothing to conserve the crabs while killing thousands. Their own estimate is well over 65,000 a year, but independent estimates double that. This killing could also stop because a new synthetic lysate is available and can be used now, potentially cutting the need for natural lysate by 90%.
Why kill such a valuable animal? It all started because the fishing industries saw little value and figured why not destroy the population until they are no longer economically viable. Its called economic extinction and sadly it’s a tradition amongst Delaware Bay fishers still carried out this to this day on eels, conch, and other species. But they didn’t know back in the early 90’s they would wrecking the entire ecosystem.
In 1991, we counted an average of 80,000 horseshoe crabs/meter squared. Now we count 8,000. Then the eggs stayed at that level for all of May and June then hatched young at similar densities. In other words, the horseshoe crab was a keystone producer of an abundant resource that maintained the bay ecosystem. It was not just chance that at the same time the bay has one of the most productive weakfish and blue claw crab fisheries in the Atlantic coast. Fish populations blossomed with the flush of horseshoe crab eggs and hatched young each year.
Now we must bring it back. For the birds, for the fish, and for the people who love to bird and fish.
A storm looms over Delaware Bay. The last 4 days have been rain, some intense and cold. The water temperature needs to be 59 degrees or so for Crabs to spawn. On Saturday the 19th the water temperature fell below and the spawn virtually stopped in many places. It should resume with the warmer temperatures of Saturday and Sunday.
We are grateful to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and other donors who make this project possible.
Dr. Larry Niles has led efforts to protect red knots and horseshoe crabs for over 30 years.
© 2019 Conserve Wildlife Foundation of New Jersey