Our local aquarium hosted a family crab walk recently, in which we had a fantastic time. It was of course, both educational and fun!
We found out that this opportunity comes about only twice this spring season. Due to the full moon and high tides that will happen once in May and in June. The horseshoe crabs come in to lay their eggs, which gives us the perfect opportunity to observe!
The instructors told us how to identify the different sexes, how to look for and read the tagging band if they were indeed tagged before. Also, along with us for this family hike was a wildlife tagger who showed us how a horseshoe crab is tagged then recorded. As many hikers waded in the water (mostly the older children) over a dozen horseshoe crabs were found, picked up for hands-on observation, tagged or received a tag and was recorded!
Hard to see in this photo, but we were able to observe the tools used for tagging the crabs as well!
It was overall a wonderful experience as we met other nature enthusiasts and saw many other ocean creatures as we walked along the shoreline.
During the next week at home we continued to read several books from the library about animals with shells and drew several of them in our nature notebook as well as photos from our adventure!
Our local aquarium hosted a family crab walk recently, in which we had a fantastic time. It was of course, both educational and fun!
We found out that this opportunity comes about only twice this spring season. Due to the full moon and high tides that will happen once in May and in June. The horseshoe crabs come in to lay their eggs, which gives us the perfect opportunity to observe!
The instructors told us how to identify the different sexes, how to look for and read the tagging band if they were indeed tagged before. Also, along with us for this family hike was a wildlife tagger who showed us how a horseshoe crab is tagged then recorded. As many hikers waded in the water (mostly the older children) over a dozen horseshoe crabs were found, picked up for hands-on observation, tagged or received a tag and was recorded!
Hard to see in this photo, but we were able to observe the tools used for tagging the crabs as well!
It was overall a wonderful experience as we met other nature enthusiasts and saw many other ocean creatures as we walked along the shoreline.
During the next week at home we continued to read several books from the library about animals with shells and drew several of them in our nature notebook as well as photos from our adventure!
I really wish we could have joined your walk to see the horseshoe crabs laying their eggs. That is very special! And so much better than reading about this in books.
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