Embedded Files
Jeff Good
Wildlife Biologist
(Shellfish Research Section)
Rachel Bonafilia
Wildlife Biologist
(Ecosystems Research Group in the ACE Basin)
Daniel Farrae
Wildlife BIologist
(Estuarine Finfish-Genetics)
Felicia Sanders
Wildlife Biologist
(Seabird Coordinator)
Atlantic Brief Squid
One of the only cephalopods that can survive in the rapidly changing salinities of an estuary/salt marsh, which makes it a primary food source for an array of commercially and ecologically important animals.
It has some of the best eyes of the estuarine predators, being able to hunt in murky water using sight as its primary sense.
You can tell the how old a brief squid is by counting the DAILY growth rings of its statolith (almost like year rings of a tree or fish otolith).
Wood Stork
Adults drip water from their beaks onto nestlings to cool them down.
Scientists band wood stork chicks to learn more about them. These bands go around their ankles to help track where they travel to. This is done with many bird species.
Is the only stork found in North America!
Atlantic Sturgeon
Atlantic sturgeon spawn during the spring and fall in certain rivers, mostly through the middle of their range. And everywhere that we have documented this and tested them via genetics the two groups are genetically distinct from one another!
We are still trying to learn more about how/why the different spawning groups are distinct and how it occurred evolutionarily.
Red Knot
A Red Knot’s yearly round-trip migration is up to 18,000 miles.
Knots nest on high Arctic tundra slopes.
Some knots spend the winter at the southern tip of South America.
Red Knots concentrate in large flocks at stopover points during migration and one of the most important sites in the spring is in South Carolina.
They eat small clams and horseshoe crab eggs by probing their bill in beach sand and mud.
Daniel Sasson
Wildlife Biologist
(Crustacean Research)
Horseshoe Crab
Horseshoe crabs are the only extant (living) species that use book gills to breathe!
Research has shown that horseshoe crabs have been spawning in salt marshes as well as beaches.
Horseshoe crabs have been found to be important part of the diet of Loggerhead and Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles.
Apart from rearing in captivity, there is no way to know for sure how old an adult horseshoe crab is. But you can roughly estimate age by the condition of the carapace.
Horseshoe crabs are often called “living fossils” but this is a misnomer: they have never stopped evolving. But fossils looking fairly similar to living horseshoe crabs date back at least 450 million years.
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