Essex County - Maplewood - Horseshoe Crabs
Sunday, September 15 – Essex County Sunday, September 15 - Maplewood, Essex County Horseshoe Crabs: A Fascinating Conservation Study If you headed ‘down the Shore’ this summer, you may have brushed up against a few horseshoe crabs on the beach – and had hardly given a thought to these odd, distant relatives of spiders. Yet horseshoe crabs are 300 million-year-old living fossils that are so valuable that in the late 1990s they became the center of a perfect storm of competing interests. At 2:00 pm Sunday, New Jersey environmentalist Tedor Whitman will tell us why commercial fisheries, tourism officials, ornithologists, government (local, county, state, and federal) agencies, and pharmaceutical interests all fought to determine the use and future of these animals. Fortunately, the fate of the horseshoe crab fell into the hands of a resourceful biological technician and a handful of determined citizens. Tedor Whitman is the Executive Director of the Cora Hartshorn Arboretum and Bird...