Horseshoe Crab Egg Study Technician

The annual egg abundance surveys are done as part of an evaluation of a long-term beach restoration project. The project aims to improve beach habitat quality for horseshoe crabs and migratory shorebirds along New Jersey’s Delaware Bay coast. By surveying the horseshoe crab egg clusters buried in the sand, as well as the surface eggs on top of the sand, we can evaluate the habitat quality of the beaches, as well as the food availability for migratory shorebirds that depend on horseshoe crab eggs during their stopover in Delaware Bay.
 
Key responsibilities include:

•         Working as part of a team in a daily field data collection effort.
•         Working in potentially hot/rainy and almost certainly buggy conditions.
•         Field data collection is timed around low tide, which advances by about an hour every day. This means some days you’ll be getting up early to catch the morning low tide, others you’ll start fieldwork in the afternoon to catch an evening low tide.
•         Counting deep horseshoe crab egg clusters and collecting shallow egg cluster samples along transects at various Delaware Bay beaches.
•         Counting individual crab eggs collected in shallow samples in a temporary lab setting at Reeds Beach.
•         Daily inputting field data into an Excel sheet used for analysis.  You will need a laptop with Excel software.
•         Occasionally interacting with members of the public if they have questions or if they are on a restricted access beach without permission.
•         Potentially assisting with shorebird banding efforts on weekends and off-hours.
•         Attending nightly meetings/free dinner with the extended team, including weekends, mid-May through early June, to debrief and share any thoughts/findings.
•         Work is for 6 weeks, beginning the first week of May and ending around mid-June.

 
Please direct any questions to Theo Diehl at diehl.theo@gmail.com