Celebrating an iconic, important Delaware Bay denizen

Seven-year-old Samantha Dunn grimaced, put her hands to her head and silently backed away Saturday as she got a close-up look at the churning, claw-tipped legs and gills under the helmet-like shell of a horseshoe crab on Saturday.

"She's just getting used to them," her father, birding enthusiast John Dunn, said as he assured her they would shortly take a break at a face-painting table at the annual Peace, Love & Horseshoe Crab Festival at the DuPont Nature Center near Slaughter Beach. "My son's more the expert."

The Dunns came early to the sixth-annual program at the center, part of the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control Mispillion Harbor Reserve. Part springtime celebration, part public conservation education effort, the event focuses on one of the more-iconic links in the Delaware Bay's complex and fragile ecosystems.

Center officials time the event to coincide with the crab's annual spawning journey onto local beaches, where they lay countless eggs that, in addition to continuing the species, provide food for migrating shorebirds.

In recent decades however, both the crab and some bird species have been imperiled by overfishing, shoreline erosion and habitat loss along the migratory paths of bird species that might travel thousands of miles on their annual round trips.

"The Horseshoe crab population has been stabilized," said center manager Dawn Webb. "We're seeing more of them around this area" with greater numbers now spreading along mudflats at the mouth of Cedar Creek in addition to along the bay shoreline.

Years of habitat improvements around the center also are paying off, Webb said, with "living" shoreline projects by the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary becoming a welcoming forage spot for arriving birds.

"We're doing everything we can to help the horseshoe crab population rebuild," said Gary Kreamer, coordinator of aquatic resources education for DNREC. "We've been seeing more young mature crabs in recent years."

"The fisheries management, I think, is very good in Delaware Bay, very sustainable," Kreamer said.

Once massive crab populations plummeted in recent decades as fish-meal factories and bait fisheries took huge numbers. Medical testing laboratories added to the pressure after the crab's blood proved useful for its sensitivity in testing.

Delaware has limited the number of crabs harvested along the bay for years, allowing only males to be taken. New Jersey adopted an outright moratorium in 2008.

But other states have declined to take steps in their estuaries, and perils remain.

Federal officials last year listed as threatened the Red knot, a shorebird that stops in Delaware Bay each year on a nearly 20,000 annual round trip between the southern tip of South American and the Arctic. Crab eggs are an essential food source for the Red knots, famished by the time they reach the Mid-Atlantic, and in 2011 researchers found that the bird's population had fallen by nearly a third in a year.

So it is that a gigantic statue of one particular shorebird, B-95, stands outside the DuPont center's entrance.

Mike Hudson, a biology major at Washington University in Chestertown, Maryland, and a founder of Friends of the Red Knot, said the statue pays tribute to a particular bird that has been banded, tracked and observed again and again on Delaware Bay. Author Philip Hoose devoted a book to B-95 and the species in general: "Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor."

"Red knots do show site fidelity," said Hudson, whose work at the DuPont center dates to its opening in 2007, and who was mentioned in Hoose's book. "If they go back multiple years and find food in the same place, they'll keep coming back. The flocks are remembering good spots to hang out."

The saga of the delicate shorebird's improbable link to the armored crab has become a popular environmental education topic in school, Webb said. Field trips to the center have been on the rise. A student group at Milford High School now heads out in springtime to flip over crabs unable to right themselves after winding up on their backs.

On Saturday, fourth graders who took up a class project Columbia, Maryland, trekked to the shore after a yearlong Horseshoe crab-rearing project in Howard County. The group, Pointers Run Elementary School Horseshoe Crab Scientists, released dozens of tiny crabs at Sandy Point State Park on the Chesapeake Bay.

Jack Smoot, who made the trip from Columbia with his son Ashley, said the class camped overnight in Delaware this weekend and surveyed crab arrivals Friday night on Slaughter Beach.

"They give up their recess for it," Smoot said. "The teacher makes it a lot of fun, it shows them how important it is to appreciate nature – they'll remember it their whole life."

Contact Jeff Montgomery at 463-3344 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com.