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the removable FEAST Every spring for centuries, red knots have fueled their 9,000-mile migration by gorging themselves on horseshoe-crab eggs at Delaware Bay. Now overzealous crab fishermen have nearly stripped the knots' cupboard bare. By Jon R. Luoma From behind the dunes on Delaware bay, you can hear them, red knots flying low, just above the tide line. On this sunny spring day, so many knots are flying together, coursing up and down the beach, that their wings sound like a giant deck of cards in mid-shuffle. If you walk beyond the dunes, you can see the wing-whirring flocks, clouds of these shorebirds the size of robins: flashes of gray, black, white, maybe a bit of salmon red. A casual observer might not realize that this is one of nature's most spectacular phenomena. After all, Delaware Bay is hardly some remote nature park. Dividing southern New Jersey from the Delmarva Peninsula, the bay lies just a few hours' drive from the asphalt and smog of Philadelphia and New York, and it's a major shipping lane, with container ships and oil tankers chugging by. Yet a closer look hints that something peculiar and remarkable is under way here. On a good day there can be thousands of small birds concentrated on a single stretch of the beach--a moving, bobbing, wavering blanket of birds, virtually obscuring the sands like a great feathered super-organism. And crawling slowly among the birds or washing up the beach on the surf are wet, brown helmet-shaped creatures that look like something from an alien world: horseshoe crabs, among the earth's most ancient animals. Each year, from late May to early June, horseshoe crabs pull themselves onto the beaches of Delaware Bay, primarily on the new moon and full moon tides. Scoop up some sand and you'll see what's going on: The crabs are here to breed and to lay billions of tiny, pinhead-size eggs, filling the sand with tapiocalike green clumps. And precisely when the crabs begin to lay their eggs, the red knots (along with a handful of other kinds of shorebirds, including ruddy turnstones, sanderlings, and semipalmated sandpipers) arrive from points south to feed voraciously on those eggs. The two events, always simultaneous, are no coincidence. The crabs' egg-laying season and the shorebirds' migratory stopover are critically linked, a symbiosis that has evolved over thousands of years. The knots arrive here in the course of one of the most astonishing migrations in the avian world. In terms of annual migratory mileage, they just about circumnavigate the globe. Each spring the birds fly from the southern reaches of South America to well above the Arctic Circle. Then, only weeks later, after breeding and nesting, they head back to South America. "In the world of birds," says biologist Allan Baker, "red knots are Olympic marathon runners." Covering thousands of miles at a stretch without rest, red knots make precious few stops along that marathon springtime route. And Delaware Bay, with its rich and fatty load of horseshoe-crab eggs, might be the most important of those stops, because the birds need an abundant supply of such food to have any chance of completing their northward migration and nesting successfully. Tragically, since the 1980s horseshoe-crab populations have been in a steep decline, a decline likely brought on by overzealous "harvesting" (mining might be a more accurate word) by enterprising commercial fishermen. Although humans don't eat horseshoe crabs, over the years untold thousands of the animals have been dredged from the ocean depths or simply retrieved from beaches by hand during their breeding season to be ground up and turned into garden fertilizer. In recent years the crabs have more often been sliced up and used as bait for eels and conch. According to a 1998 report by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, between 1993 and 1996 the annual horseshoe-crab take more than quadrupled. On a hot spring morning, a team of scientists waits here behind the dunes for more than two hours. As the sun reaches its zenith, an osprey works overhead. A tiny spider ardently scales the side of a human footprint in the sand. Laughing gulls cackle and shriek; red-winged blackbirds trill and rattle from the dunes. The low roar of the surf accompanies the steady whir of red knots and other shorebirds cruising the beach. While researchers know about the horseshoe-crab decline, they're now trying to determine if, and to what extent, the red knots might also be in trouble. During the past few years a handful of scientists, accompanied by a corps of eager volunteers, have been spending a great deal of time here on Delaware Bay. They try to stay out of sight, mumbling at each other through two-way radios, swatting at mosquitoes, and waiting for a flock of shorebirds to work toward a spot on the beach called the "landing zone." At long last, several dozen red knots walk, hop, and peck their way down the beach toward this landing zone. As a two-way radio crackles a warning, a researcher triggers a remote-control detonator, and two small cannons go off with a deep thud, launching a "capture net" that traps the birds. Moments later the red knots are taken out of the net and passed to volunteers, who sort, weigh, band, and then release the birds. I pause and am struck by the power of a red knot's tiny heart, beating against the palm of my hand. Two weeks earlier this small bird with the furiously pumping heart and the others in the net were feeding and fattening up in the southernmost parts of South America, most of them in Tierra del Fuego, the last landfall before Antarctica. With as few as two or three stops along the way, they've flown to Delaware Bay, a journey of almost 9,000 miles. When they arrive they're at half their starting weight, their bodies devoid of fat and even some muscle. Here, in two weeks or so, each red knot will--must--double its weight. In a fit of almost maniacal eating, a knot devours more than 100,000 horseshoe-crab eggs, fueling up for the final leg of its marathon. When they've had their fill, the knots depart en masse, as suddenly as they arrived, so weighed down with new muscle and fat that they often have trouble getting airborne. Next stop: the Arctic nesting grounds beyond Hudson Bay, 1,000 or so miles to the north. The birds arrive there in June, just as the snows melt. The nesting stop, too, will be brief: By mid-July the chicks will be born from camouflaged eggs laid on the tundra, and the females will head south again, followed in early August by the males, which have stayed behind with the growing chicks. The males, in turn, will be followed a few weeks later by the newly fledged chicks, which somehow make their way, without adults, the nearly 10,000 miles back to Patagonia or Tierra del Fuego. (In their superb book, The Flight of the Red Knot, ornithologist Brian Harrington and coauthor Charles Flowers likened the chick's early life to that of a human baby who must grow to 60 pounds in six weeks and then "stride off and emulate its mother's six-thousand-mile trans-Himalayan trek.") The migration demands astounding navigational skills. From South America northward, for instance, the birds fly over open water, with few landmarks. A navigational error of only a few degrees would send the birds miles off course, yet they arrive at their destination here on the bay with great precision. So far, science can only provide clues to how the knots pull off this astonishing feat. From studies of other birds, it appears that migrants variously use the sun, the stars, even the length of day for navigation; many species, it seems, use traces of the mineral magnetite found in their brains and the earth's magnetic field to navigate. Radar studies show that long-distance migrants even move along the same sort of curvilinear routes that pilots plot to minimize the distance between two points on a round globe. Scientists believe that red knots probably evolved to take on such daunting journeys largely to exploit food supplies, trading, for instance, the enormous energy spent on their northward journey for the great flush of edible insects and aquatic invertebrates in the Arctic's short summer. As they fly back south, they gorge on clams and mussels, whose populations peak in late July and August along the northeast coast of the United States. During the Argentine spring and summer, they feast on the crustaceans whose numbers explode there. Then, the following spring, they fly 9,000 miles north for the brief cornucopia of protein-rich horseshoe-crab eggs at Delaware Bay. But here on the bay lies the rub. According to Larry Niles, chief of New Jersey's Division of Fish, Game, and Wildlife's Endangered and Non Game Species Program, the number of horseshoe crabs breeding on the New Jersey side of the bay has plummeted by 90 percent since 1990. Individual horseshoe crabs tend to bury their eggs out of reach of the red knot's inch-long bill. But when there are thousands of horseshoe crabs on a beach, their sheer creeping, crawling, digging numbers constantly churn up the sand, and eggs buried deep by one crab are exposed by the next. In short, fewer breeding crabs could not only mean far fewer eggs, it could also mean far fewer eggs the birds can get to. "They can probe for eggs to some extent," Niles says. "But that takes too much time and energy. The main advantage of Delaware Bay has been that there are so many eggs on the surface that the birds can just land and mow them, like mowing a lawn. "We're in the middle of a drama," he says. "And it's a scary drama. If the crabs continue to fail, some red knots might not gain enough weight to make it to their breeding grounds." Research in the past two years suggests that the birds stopping at Delaware Bay are expending more time and energy finding crab eggs while they're there. Knots outfitted with tiny radio transmitters are crossing the bay frequently, and Niles suggests that the delays in finding enough food could be extending the time the knots need to gain enough weight to reach their nesting grounds; this, in turn, could disrupt their already brief nesting period. Even if the females survive the trip to the Arctic, without sufficient food energy they could fail to produce eggs. Last summer Niles helped lead a team to the Arctic that located a cluster of nesting red knots north of Hudson Bay. Although he says the information collected from that visit remains scant and is only preliminary, it did hint that an unusual number of birds were failing to reproduce. And the most logical explanation, he thinks, is a lack of nutrition in the form of Delaware Bay horseshoe-crab eggs. Overall, evidence suggests that red knot populations are in a steep and steady decline. In the 1980s ornithologist Brian Harrington estimated that 150,000 knots visited the bay each spring. In the past five years, counts have yielded no more than 80,000 birds. And the count in 2000 was 8 percent lower than 1999's. This past February Niles's research team returned from Tierra del Fuego's Bayhia Lomas, the red knot's most important wintering ground, with sobering news: A population that had numbered an estimated 45,000 as recently as a year ago appears to have plummeted to only 26,000, though, again, Niles cautions that the data are preliminary. Last year, with spring's crab egg laying and shorebird gluttony still in full swing, I found biologist Allan Baker working at a table with colleague Humphrey Sitters on the bayside porch of a small beach house the researchers had rented for the season. Baker is head of the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation Biology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and one of the leading international researchers studying the plight of the red knot. He nodded as Sitters, a biologist who recently graduated from Oxford University, pointed out that the knots rest infrequently on their northward journey each spring, flying day and night literally thousands of miles, and stopping perhaps only at two or three key "stepping-stone" habitats in Argentina and Brazil before proceeding to Delaware Bay. Each stopover appears to be crucial, Sitters says. "If one goes missing, they can't get to the next one." "It's a small chain of key sites stretched across two continents," Baker agrees. And then he nods out a large screened window at the bay just beyond the porch. "And if this bird is going to survive, this is stepping stone numero uno." Red knots prosper in South America and the Arctic without horseshoe-crab eggs to devour. In fact, research has shown that they have the astonishing ability to reconfigure their stomachs depending on the kind of food they eat, which ranges from soft worms to small but very hard-shelled mussels that the bird crushes in its stomach. The world's two other large populations of red knots, which winter in Africa and Australia, migrate to the Arctic without the benefit of horseshoe-crab eggs, instead finding other suitable high-energy foods. Clearly, the knots along the Atlantic Flyway have evolved to take advantage of the crab eggs. It's possible that if the supply of crab eggs continues to decline, the knots would simply find other kinds of food here at Delaware Bay, although no one knows for sure. But on the porch that day, Sitters had before him a dishpan full of sand and gravel from a nearby beach. All spring he had been trying to determine what small clams or other alternative foods might be available around the bay. The prospects did not look promising. "This sample is typical," Sitters said. "There's simply not much here. A few clams, a few snails, but nothing like what it would take to support a large population of shorebirds." In other words, all signs continue to point to the horseshoe crab's critical role in red knot survival along the Atlantic Flyway. Finally, last August, there was some good news for red knots: The federal government established a no-catch horseshoe-crab sanctuary in and around the bay (see "New Hope for an Ancient Mariner," page 54). "Our hope is that it will stabilize the harvest," Niles says. "Unfortunately, we've already seen significant damage to the crab population, but at least this should stop further declines." Sometime this May the first droves of horseshoe crabs will scale the beach, their shells glistening wet. There may be fewer than last year, but they will still be crawling ashore like a landing party from some alien world. On perfect, synchronized cue, the red knots will arrive, quickly packing on body weight at a miracle pace among the breeding crabs, the two species replaying like clockwork their old ecological ritual. The crabs and the knots seem to be hanging on. But with the help of some heightened human resolve, both may yet again flourish. "Red knots are fantastically interesting birds in and of themselves," Baker says. "But this association between the birds and the crabs is a wonder of the world of biology. If we can't protect this kind of heritage, then God help us." http://magazine.audubon.org/features0105/removable_feast.html

:blah::blah::blah:

it just would've been too easy that way

i've seen the video ... and i am very sceptical ... i got stabbed once and it was only a centimeter long cut, not too deep but enough to cut the skin but not the tendon(it's hard to explain) and afterwards my jeans were literally soaked in blood ... and this was coming from the vein on my left ring finger, just below the knuckle(like if you look at your hand you will see tendons that control your fingers) ... now if my jeans were to be soaked in blood from a relatively small wound cut by a broken 40 ounce(Old English ) ... how much blood would come from one of the biggest and most powerful veins in the human body, the jugular????

Yes, you! You with the north face bubble jacket hangin' down so low it looks like a trench coat. Go out to the store and buy some new jeans that fit, and pull them up all the way over your butt like a normal human being. And while you're at it, give your mommy back her night gown you try and pass off as a T-shirt. Do you realize how stupid you look in your mommies night gown? Judging from the way you swagger when you walk, like a chimpanzee trying to sober up, I think you probably do not, but just to clear things up you look an overgrown Swee'pea gone wrong. And no I am not "yo niggah" nor am I "yo dawg" and there is no possibility I am related to your fashionably challenged and outdated ass so do not call me "yo bruddah." And no, NO you are not cool in your BMW blasting your Eminem and your Vanilla Ice, so just accept THAT YOU ARE NOT A GANGSTER! YOU WILL NEVER BE A GANGSTER! Mobb Deep would most likely shank your stupid ass for less than that. I mean you live in the 'burbs, your daddy is paying your way through college, and you live in a house that costs more than entire projects do. So please do all us normal people a favor and ask mommy for your allowance and go out and welcome yourself into the new millenium by buying yourself a new wardrobe, and a new attitude while your at it.

well ... he reformed welfare for one .... i don't get this ... you right wingers should praise him for this at the very least give him credit where credit is due .... i remember all the 'commies' all up and arms about that but ya know ... ppl were living off of welfare and he set limits on it which is a good thing, putting them to work instead of leeching off of us tax payers he also got rid of the national debt and created a surplus for the first time in american history(so far as i know, feel free to correct me if I am wrong) ... even if i am it was still great that he got rid of all that debt that reaganomics created ok .. bk to topic ... I think reagan was a great president because he instilled a sense of patriotism ... regardless of what you think of his economic policy(i'm not a fan BTW) ... he made you feel proud to be an American ... he had a certain charisma that you just couldn't help but respect him as your leader ... He really gave America a much needed sense of identity ... after the Vietnam war the gov't(and America as a country) had lost a big amount of trust and respect and he did alot to restore that trust and respect

"President Bush went out touting his economic record in Ohio last week. Now this is a state that lost 225,000 jobs since Bush took office. You know, if Bush wants to tout his record, he should do it somewhere where the Bush economy has actually created jobs, like India, or Thailand, or China." -- Jay Leno "President Bush has unveiled his first campaign commercial, highlighting all of his accomplishments in office. That's why it's a 60-second spot." -- Jay Leno "President Bush says he has just one question for the American voters, "Is the rich person you're working for better off now than they were four years ago?" -- Jay Leno "The election is in full-swing. Republicans have taken out round-the-clock ads promoting George Bush. Don't we already have that? It's called Fox News." -- Craig Kilborn "Kerry is well on his way to reaching his magic number of 2,162. That's the total number of delegates he needs to win the Democratic nomination. See, for President Bush it's different, his magic number is 5. That's the number of Supreme Court judges needed to win." -- Jay Leno "There was a scare in Washington when a man climbed over the White House wall and was arrested. This marks the first time a person has gotten into the White House unlawfully since President Bush." -- David Letterman "Bush admitted that his pre-war intelligence wasn't what it should have been. But we knew that when we elected him!" -- Jay Leno "A new poll says that if the election were held today, John Kerry would beat President Bush by a double digit margin. The White House is so worried about this, they're now thinking of moving up the capture of Osama Bin Laden to next month." -- Jay Leno "The White House is now backtracking from its prediction that 2.6 million new jobs will be created in the U.S. this year. They say they were off by roughly 2.6 million jobs." -- Jay Leno "In Louisiana, President Bush met with over 15,000 National Guard troops. Here's the weird part: nobody remembers seeing him there." -- Craig Kilborn "President Bush said he was 'troubled' by gay people getting married in San Francisco. He said on important issues like this, the people should make the decision, not judges. Unless of course we're choosing a President, then he prefers judges." -- Jay Leno "The White House has now released military documents that they say prove George Bush met his requirements for the National Guard. Big deal! We've got documents that prove Al Gore won the election." -- Jay Leno "There was an embarrassing moment in the White House earlier today. They were looking around while searching for George Bush's military records. They actually found some old Al Gore ballots." -- David Letterman "The big story now is that President Bush is coming under attack for his service in the National Guard. The commanding officers can't remember seeing Bush between May and October of '72. President Bush said, 'Remember me? I'm the drunk guy.'" -- Jay Leno "On Meet the Press yesterday, President Bush was asked what he would do if he lost the election, and Bush said, 'Shhh, you mean like last time?'" -- Jay Leno "This week, both John Kerry and Wesley Clark are making campaign appearances with the guys who saved their lives in Vietnam. Meanwhile, President Bush is campaigning with a guy that once took a math test for him." -- Conan O'Brien "President Bush released his new $2.4 trillion federal budget. It has two parts: smoke and mirrors." -- Jay Leno "It's weird watching President Bush struggle with excuses for why we went to war. As he struggles, it reminds us all what a terrific liar Bill Clinton really was." -- Craig Kilborn "As you know, President Bush gave his State of the Union Address, and it was interrupted 70 times by applause and 45 times by really big words." -- Jay Leno "President Bush said that American workers will need new skills to get the new jobs in the 21st century. Some of the skills they're going to need are Spanish, Chinese, and Korean, because that's where the jobs went." -- Jay Leno "President Bush wants to build a space station on the moon. And from the moon, he wants to launch people to Mars. You know what this means. He's been drinking again." -- David Letterman "Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has written a book about his years with the Bush Administration. He said that President Bush, while at cabinet meetings, is disengaged; he's uninformed, distracted, and passive, and the Democrats are saying to themselves 'How can we possibly beat this guy?'" -- David Letterman "The new Prime Minister of Spain has called the war in Iraq a disaster, and plans to bring his troops home as soon as possible. In fact, President Bush is so upset at Spain that he is now threatening to close down the border between Spain and the U.S." -- Jay Leno "The U.S. Army confirmed that it gave a lucrative postwar contract in Iraq to the firm once run by Vice President Dick Cheney without any competitive bidding. When asked if this could be conceived as Cheney's friends profiting from the war, the spokesman said Yes." -- Conan O'Brien "Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge has unveiled a new color-code system to warn the public about different states of danger. Red is the highest state of alert, and it means that Dick Cheney is about to eat a mozzarella stick." -- Conan O'Brien "Dick Cheney finally responded today to demands that he reveal the details of the Enron meetings. This is what he said. He met with unnamed people, from unspecified companies, for an indeterminate amount of time at an undisclosed location. Thank God he cleared that up." -- Jay Leno "Plans are being discussed as to who will replace Dick Cheney if he has to resign for health reasons. It's not easy for President Bush, he can't just name a replacement. He would first have to be confirmed by the oil, gas and power companies." -- Jay Leno "President Bush spoke briefly to reporters before playing a round of golf in Crawford, Texas earlier today... This raises the question: Shouldn't the guy who is really running the country and who has had like 20 heart attacks be taking the vacation?" -- Craig Kilborn "According to doctors, George Bush has the lowest heart beat ever recorded by someone in the White House. Well, the second lowest, Dick Cheney, got his down to zero a couple of times." -- Jay Leno "President Bush played golf yesterday and I understand Vice President Dick Cheney also got in a couple of strokes." -- Jay Leno "While speaking to conservationists this week, Dick Cheney made it clear that he plans to deal with the rising gas prices by drilling in our federal wildlife refuge in Alaska. Cheney tried to sway his opponents by saying 'Trust me, there's enough oil up there to last us the rest of my natural life.'" -- Tina Fey, on Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update "Back in 2000, a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!" -- James Carville

i'm a tity man myself .. but like ... umm ... there is a such thing as too much of a good thing

i hate it when a great leader dies and then people like obby bring in all this politics ... talk about how good a leader reagan was ... and as a bush hater I believe he was the best president i've lived through (which isn't saying much BTW) ... not compare him to clinton or whoever (hell i'd rather have reagan with all his alzheimers than what we have today)

learn ya history Son, then talk to me

Yes ... but at least we wouldn't be giving them a reasonable one

I don't even need to read this bullshit ... i smelled it a mile away ... anywaY ... hmmm ... it's entitled "LIBERATION FORGOTTEN" ... igloo .... remember reading in your history books about a "little skirmish" called the "Revolutionary War"? lmao ... didn't think so

interesting ... good to read something here that's NOT about the Iraq war for a change

well yea ... we pulled out of vietnam just as we were about to win the war ... but that doesn't make the war right compared to what? the taliban? this is total bullshit ... remember what happened in spain?

vote your least favorite republican off the island Republican Survivor

ok i gotta lil off topic so sue me anyway ... i wouldn't say this is the worst day at work but annoying none-the-less ... i was working retail years ago and this girl comes up to me and starts screaming and yelling at me, she was puerto rican im guessing because of how fast she was talking at any rate i couldn't understand a word she was saying, so i said firmly "no hablo espanol" ... at that point she went into a fit of rage and i realized she was yelling in english ... im so glad i dont work there anymore as that was a nearly daily experience

i was talking to a friend and she said she was talking with a guy and she asked her to cam with her ... only to find out he was jerking off i swear what goes through some guys heads "well if she see's me shirkin it im definitely gonna get some":rolleyes:

i guess the one lieing down is on a doggy break (oh god that was horrible)

yea ... gore is insane ... insulting Nixon like that

yea ... that def looked boring as hell

i betchya that scared the shit outta ya didnt it?

I dont think we should all out ban abortion, but there needs to be more limits to it then what there is. I mean girls are using it as birth control, and that's just not right. In that case normal mentioned, yea, that's fine, we don't need rape genes running around.

yes the same applies for guys ... sex makes babies that what it does. If you're not ready to deal with the consequences then you shouldn't be doing it. The same goes for just about everything.

a couple of pervs don't make a whole institution bad

that's another thing it's NOT the womans body that's in question, it's the life inside her body