We arrived at ~4am this morning after a very long drive. We were kind of lazy for most of the rest of the day because we were so tired. We went to the grocery store, came home and took naps, then walked on the beach a bit.
There were a lot of interesting things on the beach. First, there was a dead but beautiful puffer fish.
Also, there were hundreds (thousands?) of shark egg cases (below) and lots of sting ray egg cases.
Best of all, there were 5 dead sting rays; 3 of one fairly big species with a big shovel-like structure under their noses (a quickk internet search shows this to be an Atlantic Cownose Ray), and 2 guitar-fish like rays. I cut the tail off of one of the Cownose rays to try to collect the barb - it looks exactly like the 65 million year old fossil versions we find in New Jersey. The tail is in a bucket with bleach water to get the flesh off.
Atlantic Cow Nose Ray - "Overfishing the great sharks on the U.S. east coast has had major ecosystem consequences: abundances of their skate, ray, and small shark prey species have increased tremendously, and the explosion in cownose ray abundance has devastated a century-long bay scallop fishery." All of the dead cownose rays on the beach seem to cooberate this. Here's a link to the paper: http://www.mediafire.com/?bmlemhxvi23
Clear-nose Ray ???
Ed and Jeanette arrived around 8pm. We cooked dinner (burgers, fries, baked beans, salad). The girls watched the finale of American Idol. Andrew, Hazel, and Isabela arrived around 9:30pm. They flew into Norfolk, VA and rented a car to drive down. Isabela has changed so much since we saw her in February (3 months ago). She looks so much older...so cute! It's truly amazing how quickly baby's change. We were all pretty tired, so we went to bed after catching up for a little while (~12am).
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