Everyone’s heard of the Jersey Shore. Millions of us visit every summer to play in the surf
and on the boardwalk.
But New Jersey has another coastline, a hidden coast with gentle waves, beautiful beaches and some of the most glorious wildlife in the world.
We’re going to tell you the story of this coastline and the unprecedented effort to
keep it healthy and strong for generations to come.
Welcome to Delaware Bay, New Jersey's hidden coast.
Delaware Bay is really one of the special places. The biodiversity that’s found here
is unparalleled around the world.
One of the most productive fisheries on the east coast. It’s important for wintering
waterfowl. It’s one of the most important in the world for shorebirds.
It’s a migratory stopover for a lot of birds, whether it’s waterfowl, shorebirds, wading
birds, raptors…
You know, the marine diversity is amazing. You see dolphins. We just had numerous whale
sightings recently.
It’s important to invertebrates and crabs and mussels, and even the different grasses
that are unique to this area.
It’s a beautiful venue that really been almost untouched, and that’s unique to New
Jersey and pretty much the entire Atlantic Coast.
The center of this system, the little engine that drives all of this diversity, is one
of the most ancient and unusual species in the world, a living fossil we call the horseshoe
crab. Because of the bay’s uniquely hospitable conditions, horseshoe crabs have been coming
to the beaches along Delaware Bay for hundreds of millions of years.
It’s a shallow bay, and then there’s a gentle slope up to these slopes. What that
means is that horseshoe crabs can come ashore, lay their eggs, and there’s just the right
amount of erosion that when the eggs hatch, the eggs can get free and get out into the water.
You know, you have this crab that’s just, what, 450 million years old? Which is a number
that’s almost unimaginable to us. You think about the dinosaurs were here about 60 million
years ago, so they’re so far back in the geologic record that it’s really a link
to, sort of, the infinity of life on the planet. And it’s really the keystone of this ecosystem.
One of the best examples of the ecological importance of these creatures is their relationship
to an incredible bird called the red knot.
These shorebirds are only about 10 inches long, but they are built to fly.
They migrate en masse from Tierra Del Fuego, at the southernmost tip of South America, just north of Antarctica,
all the way up to the Arctic coast of northern Canada. That’s more than 9,000 miles each way.
So red knots travel from the southern end of Argentina, they come to the Delaware Bay – they’re generally depleted.
They’ve lost a lot of energy and weight as a result of that migratory route.
They come here, they have to double their body weight, essentially, in order to
make their way all the way up to Canada.
Here on Delaware Bay, they find a kind of food that’s ideal for bulking up to continue
their journey – the eggs of our friend the horseshoe crab.
It’s a really easy, fat food source so they can hunker down and double in weight in less than three weeks.
But the birds are just one part of what’s being helped by the crabs, ‘cause those
eggs then go into the water, the ones the birds aren’t eating, and the fish of Delaware Bay are feeding on them.
And the whole thing is made possible because of this sort of magical connection of horseshoe
crabs, Delaware Bay, and the birds, and there are so many essential aspects to it that you
pull out any one of them and the whole thing would fall apart.
Unfortunately, this system is a delicate as it is complex, and there’s real danger of
it unraveling.
We’ll see how our strained relationship with horseshoe crabs has threatened their
very existence and everything that depends on them, a natural mosaic that includes not
just the wildlife of the bay, but its people, too – and in a lot of ways, all people, everywhere.
Next time on New Jersey’s Hidden Coast.