The females are the larger and pairs will come ashore to lay eggs.

It's both bird migration season and horseshoe crab spawning season (at least where I was in FL) so thr birds eat the eggs.

Also they molt. The crabs not the birds. I have picturEs of mold I thought was remains of dead crab.

On FB I've got Gulf Specimen Marone Lab friended, they are a great small grass roots lab that has touch tanks and other things. They collect samples and also save turtles, etc. Some of their specimens have been in space.

Is anyone watching baseball? Was that Trump ad national or did he really waste those ad dollars in the Chicago market?

I tried to vote today but didn't make it in time. I might have to either vote at the downtown location or wait until Saturday.

The Republicans are throwing millions of dollars into ads in these last two weeks, apparently randomly, while screaming.

Chicago didn't even let him hold a rally here. He tried. Once.

Gary Johnson is here Saturday. t insert weed joke here

I'm sorry, Kalshane. Good luck with any treatment and the dietary changes and all.

Y'all have covered the horseshoe crabs quite thoroughly! Sorry to bring them up and dash like that.

Where's billytea? We need him to tell us about the mating habits of horseshoe crabs.

Maybe there was an echidna sighting.

One of my very earliest memories is of watching the horseshoe crabs swimming/mating in the marsh next to my childhood home. No joke.

It looks really strong that we'll flip the Senate. We need to gain four seats and two are definitely going to the Dems. And we just need to win two more out of five close races.

It's looking promising; but the Dems need a big result, not just stumbling over the line. In 2018, there'll be only eight Republican seats up for grabs; the remaining 25 wil all be Democratic or left-leaning independents. Two years of Senate control would be good; they have a very hard climb to make it four.

Where's billytea? We need him to tell us about the mating habits of horseshoe crabs.

Well now. On the whole it's pretty standard behaviour. A female digs a hole in the sand and lays thousands of eggs, one or more males fertilise them while clinging to the female's back. (The males are somewhat smaller.) However, two things are worth noting: first, a male may stay attached to a female for months at a time. Second, it may be that to get crabs to breed, they need sand or mud from the location where they themselves hatched (and to which they return to mate). It's still unclear what they might be sensing that makes the difference.

Horseshoe crabs aren't really crabs, they're more like Jillifonts, and they're really ancient, like cockroaches, unchanged for millions of years

For roughly 450 million years, in fact.

Maybe there was an echidna sighting.

There was! Not by me, it was by Lee and shrift. Still very exciting.