Buster Travels

Hi, it's Buster Rabbit again, reporting to you from St. Ignace, Michigan, overlooking Lake Huron and Mackinac Island.

Lake Huron is one of the five Great Lakes in North America. It's connected to Lake Michigan just south of here. Lake Huron is the second largest of the Great Lakes by area, and the third largest freshwater lake in the world.

The Great Lakes were formed by melting ice around 14,000 years ago when the glaciers started shrinking at the end of the last Ice Age.

In the second picture you can see Wawatam Lighthouse in St. Ignace. The lighthouse was moved here from elsewhere in Michigan, and has been a working lighthouse since 2006.

Fun fact: Did you know that the five Great Lakes contain more than 20% of the world's freshwater?

This travel bulletin has been brought to you by my friends at Hampstead Handknits.

Yikes! These are Japanese Spider Crabs, at the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, CT.

Japanese spider crabs are the largest arthropods living on earth today. Arthropods are a large group of animals that have external skeletons or shells, segmented bodies, and legs. (Lobsters, crabs, insects, spiders, centipedes and millipedes are all arthropods.)

The biggest arthropod of all time was a 9-foot long millipede called Arthropleura, who lived 300 million years ago. The second biggest was a Eurypterid. (If you've been reading my posts, you may remember that last year I encountered a giant eurypterid at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto!)

Japanese spider crabs are not spiders, but crabs. They have ten legs: 8 legs for walking, plus 2 front claws. Their front claws can extend up to 12 feet across, and they can weigh as much as 44 pounds. (See the attached photo of the specimen from the American Museum of Natural History.) Yowza!

They spend most of their time in deep water, and eat both plants and animals, including algae and shellfish, as well as dead fish and other dead bits that fall to the ocean bottom.

Here's a silly riddle for you: How do crabs call their friends? On their shell phone!

This travelogue brought to you by my friends at https://hampsteadhandknits.etsy.com

Hi, Buster Rabbit here. I'm visiting the northern fur seals at the Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, CT.

Northern fur seals are eared seals that are closer to sea lions than to true seals. Like sea lions, they have a flexible hip joint that allows them to rotate their rear flippers forward. This means that when they are are land, they can walk on all four flippers, which allows them to move more quickly.

When they are in the water, they can swivel their flippers backward and swim gracefully using their front flippers. They love to eat fish and squid.

(In contrast, true seals do not have ears you can easily see. They also do not have flexible hips, so their rear flippers always face backward.)

Like their name implies, northern fur seals live in northern waters like the north Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia, and the Sea of Okhotsk in Russia. The northern fur seals we saw at Mystic Aquarium were rescue animals or were bred in captivity.

Did you know that northern fur seals have toe nails in their back flippers, around half-way down? They can use them to scratch their faces, as you can see in one of the attached photos. The other half of their back flipper is long and very floppy. (It is floppy because it has flexible cartilage inside instead of bones.)

This travelogue is brought to you by https://hampsteadhandknits.etsy.com .