10/06/2026
🌚 We ventured out just before midnight under a nearly full, blue moon to a remote stretch of sand along Delaware Bay called Slaughter Beach. Were we insane?! Maybe? What we found blew our minds! 🤯🤯
🍂 Last autumn, while exploring the east side of the DelMarVa Peninsula, we learned of an annual phenomenon that happens along the coast of Delaware Bay every spring.
🌊 30-50 million Horseshoe Crabs come to spawn on the beaches from mid-May to mid-June -- during the highest tides at night -- under a full (or new) moon. They've been returning to this area to mate for an estimated 350 million years -- longer than it takes our sun to travel around our galaxy. Wait...what?!? 🦀🦀🦀
💙 And if that's not a reason enough to find this annual event fascinating...how about this? Their blue blood has been instrumental to the medical industry for decades! Folks, we can't even make this stuff up.
🧠🔐 Shari locked this little factoid away in her time-travel brain, and hoped the stars would align this spring as we traveled north.
⛺We grabbed the last available campsite at the Cape Henlopen State Park campground to have a basecamp to view this spectacular event, and contacted the DuPont Nature Center for specific details and parking info.
🕛 We arrived minutes before high tide, it was pitch dark, but the rising moon provided just enough light to see what looked like a shoreline covered with round, shiny rocks -- some latched on to each other in what looked like a slow moving conga line.
🩴 We walked the beach for at least an hour, stopping to watch some of the more active ones and helping a few that had flipped onto their backs in the surf. In the half mile of coast that we strolled, we estimated there were at least 80,000 crabs -- about 50 per square yard.
👋 Was it worth it? Absolutely 💯!
