. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. fflm glhimS ©mis) For the past three summers Tom Wolcott has been chasing ghost crabs up and down the beaches of North Carolina. Armed with a transistor radio and a starlight telescope, he works from dusk to dawn. Wolcott, assistant professor of zoology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, developed a consuming interest in ghost crabs (Ocypode quad- rata) when he moved to North Carolina five years ago. "The question I asked in the beginning was 'Just how important are these guys?' " he
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. fflm glhimS ©mis) For the past three summers Tom Wolcott has been chasing ghost crabs up and down the beaches of North Carolina. Armed with a transistor radio and a starlight telescope, he works from dusk to dawn. Wolcott, assistant professor of zoology at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, developed a consuming interest in ghost crabs (Ocypode quad- rata) when he moved to North Carolina five years ago. "The question I asked in the beginning was 'Just how important are these guys?' " he explains. In order to find out, Wolcott had to determine what the ghost crabs eat. "So I spent a lot of time walking up and down the beach stalking every crab that was eating and then stopping ter see what he was eating," said Wolcott. These strange antics have resulted in some sur- prising discoveries about the ghost crab's place in the food chain of the beach. Wolcott contends that the ghost crab is not the scavenger it was once believed to be. Until recently, it was assumed that ghost crabs picked their meals from rotting sea- weed and trash which washed up high on the dry sand. But Wolcott believes that the crab disdains such fare. What he found after many nights of observa- tion was that these creatures spend all their feed- ing hours below the drift line, digging for the other two crustaceans on the beach—the coquina (butterfly clam) and the emerita (mole crab). In fact, Wolcott's studies have shown that the ghost crab consumes half or more of the population of both species. That makes it the biggest predator on the North Carolina beaches. The ghost crab probably got its name from its habit of scampering silently across the beach at night and disappearing into a hole in the sand if threatened. During the day crabs stay in their individual burroughs underground. At night they come out to feed. Early in his studies, Wolcott did a burrough census and discovered
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookcollectionunclibra, booksubjectoceanography
