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Horseshoe crab counting with New York’s citizen scientists

The high-tide census of the prehistoric horseshoe crab is timed to their annual visits to the city to lay eggs on its shores. Fans of the blue-blooded arthropods will celebrate them at a festival in Jamaica Bay on June 8.

As the pinkening sun slipped behind the Manhattan skyline, a group of citizen scientists in waders paced along a scruffy rim of shoreline overlooking Jamaica Bay, attempting to tally some of the first-ever New Yorkers. Their eggs are an invaluable food source for migratory birds, like the red knot, which travels annually more than 9,000 miles from the furthest reaches of South America to the Arctic circle, making a last stop on the mid-Atlantic coast, before completing their journey north. Volunteer Zach Bailey sported a horseshoe crab tattoo while gearing up help with the count on Broad Channel, May 21, 2024. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITYTo him, it would be “so sad” if humans “took out this thing that survived multiple mass extinctions.”

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