A crab-ulous new site

       Hello! Welcome to another blog describing my weekly adventures in the Boston Harbor! This week was completely different from the rest of my summer because I am now working at a new site, Camp Harbor View. The Senior Harbor Educator that was at this site had to leave for the summer, so I got to jump in! The timing was perfect because the site I was at, Blacks Creek, ended last week.

Beautiful CHV shore, with the pier we fish from in the background

       My first week at CHV was great! The Save the Harbor team that works there is awesome and were all patient and eager in teaching me about their site. Camp Harbor View is an awesome summer camp for middle school students that live in Boston. The camp is free of cost to all participants and provides three meals a day, busing to the boat, boat rides to and from the island, camp apparel, and generally four weeks of fun. It is such a pleasure working with an organization that is providing incredible activities to so many, regardless of financial situation. At CHV, Save the Harbor teaches the campers to fish. Each day we have 4 or 5 groups of campers that come out to the pier to fish with us and to learn about the organisms we catch.

Twin day!

       The most delightful part of working at CHV is the awesome campers. My favorite age group to work with is middle school, and these kids are extra awesome. Middle schoolers can be so fun to work with because they are often still willing to get carried away with fun and silliness but you can also begin to have adult-like conversations with them. The Camp Harbor View campers are generally great at polite sarcasm and that makes them all the more fun to teach. It's clear there is a strong sense of support and acceptance at CHV, because even when they first met me campers were generally very comfortable being their true selves. It’s been lovely to be a part of a community where kids are able to have fun and be themselves!

       This week our most exciting catches were two legal size flounders that we found in our crab traps! The campers were fascinated by the flounders but also freaked out by the way they moved and splashed. I was also excited to see how many Rock and Jonah crabs are at Camp Harbor View. These are the two native crab species, and in many places that I have worked around New England they are not nearly as prevalent as the invasive species, Asian shore crabs and green Crabs. Asian shore and green crabs were accidentally brought over to the United States aboard boats from Asia and Europe, respectively. It is believed that one of the main methods of movement of invasive marine species was in the barrels commonly used for shipping. Scientists have postulated that when arriving in the New World crew members would rinse out the barrels in the ocean, accidentally releasing any taggers-on that had entered the empty barrels in their home ports. Both Asian shore and green crabs have few natural predators in US waters and reproduce at very high rates. This means that there are many of them and they compete with the native crab species for food and other resources. In recent years many biologists have reported finding more invasive crab species and less native species when exploring along the shore. Efforts are being taken to more precisely monitor all four species as well as to decrease the abundance of invasive species. The fact that we catch so many native crab species at Camp Harbor View made me excited and hopeful for the status of their populations. On Friday we had some extra exciting catches, a skate and two spider crabs that were carrying eggs! It is great fun to be at a new site where we catch new things and I get to teach about different fishing strategies.

A camper releasing the skate he caught

       All in all, I had an awesome week working at the new site. I am excited to be there next week, but also starting to feel the end-of-summer-sadness. I only have one week left at this job before I move to my fall job. This summer has flown by! Spending every day out exploring the water has been so fun and I am definitely feeling the age-old adage that “time flies when you’re having fun!”

Catch you back for my final blog!

Tessa

Shellebrating an awesome first week!

     One week of programming complete! And what a great week it was. My team is based at Black’s Creek where we are running a camp through Quincy Recreation. Starting this upcoming week we will also be running fishing programming at Curley Community Center in South Boston. At Black’s Creek, we run a camp for elementary schoolers where we play games and explore the shallow waters of the brackish water there. At the beginning of the week, some of the kids were a bit squeamish about walking into the water and touching the different creatures, but as the week progressed they became more comfortable with it. I can’t imagine how adventure-ready they will be by the end of the summer!

Some of our campers exploring the intertidal zone

     My favorite creature of the week was the horseshoe crabs, we found two this week! On Tuesday one of our campers was walking in the water, about up to her shin, and found a very large female crab. Then on Wednesday, we found another at about the same depth. This one, however, was a male and significantly smaller than the first. Many of our campers and some of the staff had never seen one. I enjoyed teaching everyone what I knew about them. My favorite thing to teach students is how to identify if they are male or female. If you flip the horseshoe crabs over and look at their front pair of legs, it looks like boxing gloves if they are male and split like a peace sign if they are female. My two favorite fun facts about horseshoe crabs are that they are more closely related to spiders than crabs and that their blood is used to detect harmful bacteria in medicines or on equipment. This dramatically impacted their population for a while, but they are being harvested less for their blood today because an alternative way to perform the same test has been discovered. The timing of this discovery is important because horseshoe crab populations have been declining due to habitat loss and overharvesting. Horseshoe crabs don’t have pinchers and if handled with care you can hold and touch them! You can read more about them on the US Fish and Wildlife website here.

Holding the smaller male horseshoe crab that we found

The awesome team I work with, holding the first horseshoe crab we found.
Left to right: Aiden, Damani, Che, and Maggie 

     We also caught many green crabs this week. We set out a crab trap daily and caught around 90 crabs Monday through Wednesday. Green crabs are a very interesting species to learn about, but it is actually a bad sign that we found so many. They are an invasive species that take resources that would otherwise be available to native crab species. Native species are defined as organisms that naturally occurred in an area before European settlement. Non-native species would be any that were accidentally or intentionally brought to an area by human influences. Invasive species are a subgroup of non-native species that specifically disrupt native species or whole ecosystems. Green crabs were unintentionally brought over to the United States, likely from ships. They are harmful for several reasons, which can be summarized by the fact that they are effective predators. Fisherfolk are particularly impacted because green crabs often eat soft-shelled clams and compete with lobster and native crabs for food. This, in turn, lowers the population of these other organisms and makes them harder for fisherfolk to find. There is research underway to study the feasibility of a green crab fishery in hopes that this could help curb the population growth. We can help to prevent the spread of green crabs and other invasive species by making sure we don't transport water, wood, or seeds from one ecosystem to another.

After catching many green crabs in our crab trap we released them and had a "crab race" to see which would make it to the water first.

     This has been a great week; I feel that I am constantly impressed with our staff, the campers, and nature all around us. The college and high school staff on my team have been wonderful, always jumping in to help and great with our campers. I have also been awed by the number of cool creatures we have found, and can’t wait for a full week out on the water!

Until next week,
Tessa

Wind and Rain and Scary Tunnels

Hello Boston!

Periwinkles and Asian Shore Crabs

Wind and rain can't stop our invasive species hunt!

This Monday was a soggy one for sure! I spent my Monday at Camp Harbor View where the wind was blowing strong, the rain was coming in sideways, and the chill went straight through you. Our first group learned about invasive species and helped us gather Periwinkle Snails and Asian Shore Crabs from the beach. We tried to hide our next group from the wind as we played What You Can't See Under the Sea on a covered pathway. As the weather progressed, we took our last group up to the fort on the island. This was my first time exploring the fort and the kids were excited to give me a spooky guided tour. At the end of the day, we had a slow and bumpy, yet heated,
boat ride back to Boston.

The perfect spiral

On Tuesday, I got to visit George's Island for the first time. Although it was still a little cold, it was not nearly as wet as Monday. When we got to George's Island, my group forced me to go into the dark tunnels that line the forts there. They definitely got a good laugh as I screamed and shuffled through the completely dark stony path. After one walk through the tunnel, I had experienced enough scary dark places for one week. I spent the remainder of my time on the island playing sports with the kids. I am quite proud to announce that my football throwing skills are getting better each day! Though I probably will not be a quarterback any time soon. I am looking forward to spending the rest of the week on George's Island and learning more of the history there.

Sea you out there,

Jennifer Leiendecker