Sexy Saturday "What's love got to do with it?"

The lobster is a solitary animal. They roam the sea floor looking for food and possibly a fight.  When two lobsters meet, there is always a challenge for territory and some fights that occur are "to the death." The only time two lobsters may inhabit the same burrow is during a brief mating encounter. Once a female has molted and her shell is still soft, she may allow a male to tickle her shell (or fancy) with his antennae.  If she is receptive, the male lobster enters the burrow.  While raising on his tail and claws, the male uses his legs to flip the female over.  The male lobster has a pair of hardened swimmeretts, or fins that he will use to pass a gelatinous blob of sperm to the female. The female has a recepticle on her shell located along her swimmeretts which will be used to store the sperm until fertilization. The female can store the sperm for several months until the egg-laying season in July and August. When a female produces fertilized eggs she fans them away to disperse with the current.  These planktonic larvae float along the surface for 4 to 6 weeks.  After molting five times, they are about an inch long.  At this time they swim to the bottom to start their sedentary lives.
The female lays about 50,000 eggs during a mating season, but only 2 will generally survive to a legal catch size for lobstering.  It takes 5 to 7 years for a lobster to grow to be one pound.

Sexy Saturday - Horseshoe Crabs

It's almost time for the horseshoe crabs again.  In the cold winter months, they go to deeper water and bury in the mud, waiting for spring. (Like the rest of us!)  As we start diving regularly again, we always see mating pairs of horseshoe crabs scooting around on the bottom. Here is their story;
The American Horseshoe Crab (Limulus polyphemus) is not actually related to a crab at all.  They are more closely related to scorpions, ticks and land spiders.  They are however, one of the longest surving species, with a design basically unchanged in 250 million years.  Their hard curved shell makes it difficult for predators to turn them over and they can adapt to big changes in temperature and salinity. A horseshoe crab can go without eating for almost a year if necessary.
Each spring during a new moon or full moon high tide, male horseshoe crabs start migrating in toward the shoreline.  Once the females start to arrive, the males release a pheromone into the water to attract them and use their compound eyes to spot a potential mate.  Once a female has been selected, the smaller male uses a glove-like claw to attach to her shell.  The female then drags the male in toward the beach.  Every few feet on shore, the female digs and deposits as many as 20,000 eggs.  The male fertilizes the eggs as he is pulled over the nest.
A female may lay as many as 90,000 eggs each season, but with very high predatory rates only about 10 percent survive to adulthood.  The eggs of the horseshoe crab are an important source of food for migratory shorebirds, and many species of fish feed on larvae or recently molted juvenilles.
For more information, NOAA has a whole website devoted to the the horseshoe crab. http://www.http//www.ceoe.udel.edu/horseshoecrab/

The best is yet to come.......

We went scuba diving on Sunday.  How could we resist a sunny day with temperatures in the fifties?  It was wonderful.  Although the water temperature was only 37 degrees, we knew that it was the last time that it would be that cold.  Now, with each passing day of warmth, the water will get warmer and warmer.  Drysuits will be put back in the closet and the wetsuits will be donned.
The visabilty on Sunday was great, allowing us to drift apart while still keeping an eye on our buddies.  We saw sand worms starting to wiggle about and a few very small creatures which we will have to look up in our reference books.
We are looking forward to a great season for diving this year.  There are wreck dives scheduled and our Advanced Diver course starts next Tuesday.   If you are interested in a refresher course, call us or e-mail.  There is so much great diving to be done in our area,  and it would be our pleasure to help you experience it.
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