Hi, I’m Derick and I am a Restoration Corp Crew Member here at the American Littoral Society. I am stationed at the office in South Jersey over in Millville. I have worked here for 3 years now. This little blog blurb will teach you all about rain gardens and why they’re so important. ​

Outflow at Frankford Bridge in Pennypack

Currently, the City is on track to reduce sewage pollution down to 7 billion gallons per year by 2036. We think that they can do better. Many other Cities, like Chicago and Portland, have found ways to cut sewage pollution down to close to zero. Even New York City has successfully implemented a series of underground storage tunnels and treatment plant upgrades to help reduce sewage pollution - they haven’t completely solved the problem, but the City at least acknowledges that they still have a long way to go.

​Solutions to this problem exist, and are not new or novel. What’s missing is the willingness of PWD to implement said solutions. The American Littoral Society is actively working to hole PWD accountable for a clean Delaware River. We are also researching solutions and funding methods to help move this issue forward. Stay engaged with us to keep learning about this issue and what you can do to help! ​

I have always had an overwhelming love for the environment, which is what led me to study Environmental Science in college. During my final year at Rowan, I developed a strong interest in conservation and restoration, but at the time, I wasn’t sure what a career in the field could actually look like. So, I applied to the Restoration Corps partly because I was frantically applying to jobs after graduation, but more importantly, I wanted an opportunity to keep learning.

Double majoring in college gave me so many incredible opportunities, but I often felt like I was missing the hands-on experience that some of my peers were gaining. I wanted to take what I had learned in the classroom and actually apply it in the field. Ironically, during college, I didn’t always enjoy fieldwork. Spending a February day knee-deep in muck in the Pine Barrens after a snowstorm wasn’t exactly my idea of fun. I didn’t like being covered in mud, and I especially hated having wet socks.

Before I knew, without realizing it, I had started to associate my dislike of certain field sites with a dislike of fieldwork itself. Then came my first day with the Restoration Corps.

​We were conducting a survey that involved climbing onto breakwater structures at Bay Point. At one point, I lost my footing and, rather gracefully, fell straight in—completely flooding my waders. Normally, I would have been miserable but instead, I laughed. That moment completely changed my perspective. I realized that I didn’t actually dislike fieldwork, I simply hadn’t found the ecosystem that I was drawn to yet. Being out on the water, working with marine species, and seeing restoration happen firsthand made me realize how much I enjoyed this kind of work. For the first time, I could genuinely picture myself building a career around it. 

Throughout my time with the Restoration Corps, I had the opportunity to participate in a variety of projects that allowed me to explore different sides of restoration and conservation. I worked on habitat restoration projects, including maintaining rain gardens by removing invasive and overgrown species and planting native plants. These native species help improve the rain gardens’ ability to filter stormwater and support the recharge of groundwater. Getting my hands dirty, this time willingly, gave me a better understanding of how relatively small restoration projects can contribute to larger environmental goals. A major part of my experience involved working directly with marine and coastal species. I assisted volunteers with tagging horseshoe crabs, conducted impingement surveys, and helped safely remove horseshoe crabs from rocks. I also participated in quadrat surveys to monitor crab populations. Beyond horseshoe crabs, I assisted with marsh surveys and oyster surveys, helping monitor mussels and oysters growing along restoration structures. These experiences gave me the opportunity to see marine restoration in action and helped me discover just how much I enjoy working with marine ecosystems and wildlife. 

Restoration isn’t just about the work happening in the field. It is also about the people who live in and interact with these ecosystems. Through volunteer events and public education programs, I had the opportunity to work with community members and help inspire people to take action for their local environment. These experiences taught me that conservation depends on more than science. It also requires communication, education, and people who are willing to care about and protect the places around them.

The Restoration Corps also helped me grow professionally. I strengthened my teamwork and leadership skills and became more comfortable taking initiative when situations required it. I learned how to assess field conditions, recognize when an environment may be unsafe, and make decisions based on those observations. Most importantly, I became more confident in my ability to contribute to a professional conservation team. 

Before joining the Restoration Corps, I was genuinely nervous about life after graduation. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to turn the things I was passionate about into a career. I knew I loved the environment, but I wasn’t sure where that passion could take me. As my time with the Restoration Corps comes to an end, I have realized that there are countless career opportunities in restoration and conservation. More importantly, I discovered something about myself: I have a huge passion for marine ecosystems and wildlife. This experience showed me that conservation isn’t just something I can be interested in, but rather it is something I can build a future around. 

The Restoration Corps also strengthened my confidence and helped me recognize that I am capable of pursuing a career in conservation. It showed me the importance of taking initiative, continuing to learn, and being willing to try something new, even when I’m not sure where it will lead. I also leave this experience with a stronger dedication to inspiring action within the communities around me. Protecting our environment requires people to care, and I want to be someone who helps create that connection between people and the ecosystems they depend on. 

​Looking back, I never expected a job that started with me frantically applying for opportunities after graduation, and falling into the water on my first day, to have such a meaningful impact on my future. I’m incredibly grateful for the people, experiences, and lessons that the Restoration Corps has given me, and I’m excited to see where this newfound passion for marine conservation takes me next.

Most of what I see are streams because we do stream assessments at least once a week. A stream assessment is a protocol to evaluate the condition of aquatic life in our area. Basically, we write down the 4 senses: what we can see, smell, touch, and hear. Most of the streams have been good. They have all the healthy macroinvertebrates(small aquatic insects that you can see with the naked eye) and have clear water with fish swimming around. ​

In 1588, Thomas Harriot published his Briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (as North Carolina was known at the time). It became a huge hit in Europe and largely shaped the European ideal of Native Americans for hundreds of years. Even today, it serves as one of our best accounts of how coastal Algonquians lived just after contact with Europeans. In a section on foods eaten by local tribes, Harriot provides the first European account of Atlantic horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) or Seekanauk: “ a kinde of cruftie shell fishe which is good meate, about a foote in breadth, hauing a cruftie tayle, many legges like a crab; and her eyes in her backe. They are founde in shallowes of falt waters; and fometime on the shore.” Later, in describing how coastal Algonquians fished, he notes that because they lack iron and steel, they make their fishing spears with "the hollowe tayle of a certaine fishe like to a fea crab” The image of a horseshoe crab can be seen in the accompanying drawing of the 1590 edition (Figure 1). 

Based on Harriot’s account, it is likely that pre- and early contact Algonquians in Coastal Carolina were eating horseshoe crabs for meat (at least occasionally) and using their telsons to fashion points on their fishing spears. In conservation biology, we refer to this as direct use – tangible foods or services that we use directly – and the value they provide as direct benefits. In the 1600s, Samuel de Champlain noted that Native Americans along the Maine coast were using dead horseshoe crabs to fertilize their corn fields – another direct use – and this practice was likely adopted by farmers in the Delaware Bay region in the 1800s, who also fed horseshoe crabs and horseshoe crab eggs to their hogs and chickens. In the latter 1800s and early 1900s, this process became more industrialized with factories springing up around Delaware Bay processing millions of crabs each year into fertilizer. Dwindling numbers of horseshoe crabs and the advent of synthetic fertilizer in the 1960s led to the cessation of these activities in the 1970s (Kreamer & Michels, 2009).
 
There have been other direct uses of horseshoe crabs in recent history. By the late 1800s, horseshoe crabs were being harvested as bait for American eels (Anguilla rostrata) and, later, for whelk (Busycon spp.) (Kreamer & Michels, 2009). Beginning in the early 1900s, the horseshoe crab was used as a model for studying how the eye and brain process visual information, research that contributed to Nobel Prize-winning discoveries on visual physiology in the 1960s (Barlow, 2009). An even more consequential discovery came in the 1950s, when scientists found that horseshoe crab blood clots in the presence of bacterial endotoxins. This observation led to the development of the Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) assay, which since the late 1970s has become the standard test for detecting bacterial contamination in injectable drugs, vaccines, intravenous fluids, surgical implants, and many other sterile medical products (Levin, 1985). As a result, virtually everyone who has received an injection, infusion, or implant over the past half century has benefited from horseshoe crabs.
 
For nearly four centuries, people valued horseshoe crabs primarily for what could be taken from them. Today, scientists increasingly recognize that their greatest value may lie in the ecological processes they support while alive. Spawning horseshoe crabs in Delaware Bay fuel one of the world's largest shorebird migrations, and their eggs also feed numerous fishes, crustaceans, worms, and other invertebrates, creating a massive seasonal pulse of energy in the Delaware Bay ecosystem. This directly supports ecotourism and recreational and commercial fisheries that can generate substantial monetary value (Edwards et al., 2011). Because this value comes from supporting ecological processes rather than through the direct use of horseshoe crabs, we refer to them as indirect benefits. Additional benefits are derived, for some, by just knowing horseshoe crabs (and the species that depend on them) exist. This is referred to as existence value.
 
Recognizing indirect and existence values has fundamentally changed how people approach conservation and management. Horseshoe crabs are no longer thought of as simply a harvestable resource, but a keystone species that supports the functioning of a healthy Delaware Bay ecosystem that, in turn, supports Delaware Bay communities. We’ve gone from creating value by extracting horseshoe crabs, to generating value by protecting them. To this end, for more than a decade, the American Littoral Society (Society) has been restoring spawning beach habitat for horseshoe crabs, with an upcoming restoration project at Kimbles beach scheduled for 2027. In addition, the Society has supported continued restrictions on horseshoe crab harvest and promoted the use of a synthetic LAL alleviating the need to catch and bleed crabs.

​What is a horseshoe crab worth? The answer depends on who you ask, and when. Over the last four centuries humans have valued horseshoe crabs as food, tools, fertilizer, bait, biomedical resources, and more recently, the foundation of an incredible coastal ecosystem. As we move further into the 21st century, our challenge is not only to continue to protect horseshoe crabs, but to continue discovering and communicating the many ways they benefit coastal ecosystems and communities.

 (For those interested, Thomas Harriot originally traveled to North Carolina in the summer of 1585 as part of a contingent of men sent by Sir Walter Raleigh of England to colonize Roanoke Island on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I. This new colony would serve as a staging point from which to search for gold on the mainland, raid Spanish ships along the coast, and establish a potential trade route to the Pacific – years earlier, Verrazzano had mistakenly described Costal Carolina as an isthmus like Panama. Harriot, an English scientist and polymath – he made huge advances in navigation, pioneered binary notation, and may have invented the < and > signs – was one of the men on the trip. While he was there, he visited multiple Coastal Algonquian tribes and recorded their way of life. John White, an artist, was also on the trip and painted the watercolors that were incorporated into the second printing of Harriot’s book (Lawler, 2018)
 
Raleigh’s colonization attempt failed. Fraying relations with local tribes led to dwindling food supplies – the colonists were almost entirely dependent on trade with the native tribes for food – and outright hostilities, and in 1586, the colonists were rescued by Sir Frances Drake, who had been raiding Spanish ports in the Caribbean. A second colonization effort was attempted in 1587, this time with men, women, and children, and a larger focus on agriculture. It also failed; however, there's some mystery about what happened to it. It is famously known as The Lost Colony.

References:
 
Barlow, R. (2009). Vision in Horseshoe Crabs. 10.1007/978-0-387-89959-6_13.
 
Edwards, P. E. T., Parsons, G. R., & Myers, K. H. (2011). The economic value of viewing migratory shorebirds on the Delaware Bay: An application of the single-site travel cost model using on-site data. Human Dimensions of Wildlife, 16(6), 435–444. https://doi.org/10.1080/10871209.2011.608180
 
Kreamer, G., & Michels, S. (2009). History of horseshoe crab harvest on Delaware Bay. In T. J. Tanacredi, M. L. Botton, & D. R. Smith (Eds.), Biology and conservation of horseshoe crabs (pp. 299–313). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-89959-6_19
 
Lawler, A. (2018). The secret token: Myth, obsession, and the search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke. Doubleday.
 
Levin, J. (1985). The history of the development of the Limulus amebocyte lysate test. Progress in Clinical and Biological Research, 189, 3–30.

July on Jamaica Bay marsh islands is a busy time for its human and animal residents. People are hitting the beach to cool off, fishes are migrating, terrapins are busy laying their eggs on sandy berms, cow nose rays are flapping in the surf, horseshoe crabs are wrapping up their spawning activity, shorebirds are coming in to feed on horseshoe crab eggs, herons like Edgar the Egret are busy feeding their fluffy young, and of course Osprey parents are working very hard feeding their own fledglings, as they need to grow large enough to migrate with their parents South for the Fall. ​

What can you do about it? The best thing you can do is if you are spending time this summer on Jamaica Bay’s shores and beaches, if you see plastic trash, take the time to pick it up, and carry it out with you at the end of your day. Every little bit helps. If you bring plastic items that become trash later, then please carry them out with you, so that they don’t escape into our waterways to cause harm to our animal neighbors. ​

What is the Littoral Society doing about it? The Littoral Society has been coordinating, and hosting volunteer beach cleanups on New York’s shorelines and beaches since 1986! This year we are celebrating the 40th Anniversary of our beach cleanup program. Every year we gather volunteers to help us clean up our marsh islands, shorelines and beaches in Jamaica Bay, and across New York State. We also collect data on our removal efforts that we then report to the Ocean Conservancy who publishes this information into a massive global dataset! ​

​In Shark River, the data from the 2026 horseshoe crab season is in, and the results are exciting! Shark River is a unique location for horseshoe crabs to access and utilize. Compared to the open waters on Delaware Bay, horseshoe crabs must travel through a turbulent inlet to access the Shark River basin and are then met with a predominately hardened shoreline.

​Yet, many of the critical beaches on which spawning horseshoe crabs congregate each year are eroding, Kimbles included. And while erosion is natural along Delaware Bay shorelines, it has been exacerbated by development, sea-level rise, and historic impacts to backing marshes, making beach habitat more prone to being lost. In response, the American Littoral Society and its partners have been restoring beaches along Delaware Bay for over a decade, with restoration planned for Kimbles in early 2027.

​By comparing the baseline data we collected this spring, to data that we collect after the beach restoration, we will be able to assess the effectiveness of our restoration work and design and implement better projects. We can also learn about horseshoe crab behavior and evaluate the impacts (if any) that our tagging program has on the crabs themselves. To that end, we are trying to answer three main questions with our monitoring at Kimbles:

​To answer the first question, we counted the number of crabs found in a series of evenly spaced 1m2 quadrats laid down along the high tide line (Figure 1). We sampled on three different occasions, primarily around the new and full moons in both the morning and evening. Because environmental variables such as water temperature and tide height can affect spawning horseshoe crab presence, we also collected data on them. And we divided the beach into zones to determine if more crabs were found in particular spots on the beach, and if so, was that due to physical characteristics such as sand depth, percentage of coarse-grained sand, or evenness of slope. All told, this monitoring will let us estimate how many crabs were on the beach before and after restoration and highlight the important beach characteristics that facilitate greater spawning. 

.​Some literature suggests that horseshoe crabs may express individual differences in activity level by time of day. Like you, horseshoe crabs have internal clocks that regulate physiological processes and behaviors. For example, the increased sensitivity of their eyes at night (up to 100,000-fold) is controlled by a circadian clock that responds to light, while the timing of their spawning to coincide with high tides is controlled by two circalunidian clocks that respond to water pressure. If certain crabs show preferences for (or only) spawn during the day or night, then that information can help us generate better estimates of their spawning numbers. To test this, we used white nail polish to paint a portion of the crabs we observed during the day and used UV flashlights to search for the painted crabs at night. The nail polish fluoresces under UV light. Horseshoe crabs do too.

Finally, to assess the potential impact of tagging on crab welfare, we used infrared cameras to record the behavior of a subset of crabs after they were tagged. We are often asked if tagging hurts the crabs. Essentially, people are asking, do crabs feel pain? Scientists infer this in animals by evaluating their neural anatomy and assessing how they respond to various behavioral manipulations (Do they avoid places where they’ve been injured? Do they display wound guarding? Do they respond to analgesics? Etc.) Our best evidence suggests that crabs likely don’t feel pain. However, restricting an animal’s ability to perform the behavior it wants to perform is also considered harmful even if the animal isn’t sentient. And it can have wider implications on its fitness and the health of the population. Consequently, if tagging interrupts horseshoe crab spawning, it could reduce the number of eggs laid over a given period, the amount of new horseshoe crabs that make it to adulthood, and the availability of horseshoe crab eggs as food for the multitudinous other species that rely on them.

​When restoration at Kimbles Beach begins in 2027, the data we've collected this year will provide an important baseline for comparison. By continuing to monitor horseshoe crabs after restoration, we'll be able to measure whether our efforts created better spawning habitat, providing us with important insights to guide restoration projects into the future.