 Penny, give us a little bit of history of the land trust. The land trust has been in existence for 26 years. We've been serving the communities of the town of Cumberland and the town of Shabig. We have 19 protected properties and almost 700 acres of land that has been protected in Casco Bay and also in Cumberland. What are the goals of the trust? Some of the goals of the trust are to protect the special natural resources in our communities and also recently we've been trying to encourage families and young children to get out and enjoy nature and that's part of what why we're here today. And you talk about your protected properties a bit. Okay, we have 10 protected properties in Cumberland. There's some farmland, some forests and some riparian areas and wetlands. We also have two islands that we own out in Casco Bay and seven protected properties out on Shabig Island, Great Shabig Island. And these protected properties, at this point, are they wild forever because you control them? Well, oftentimes the properties are owned by a property owner and we have a conservation easement on top of them which protects the special natural resources on those properties and most of our properties do have public access and so the public is encouraged to enjoy them. A couple of properties we also own. We own five properties outright and so those are obviously open to the public as well. Talk about the conservation easements for a bet. How do those work? Well, we work with property owners who are interested in protecting their land and we draft a document that outlines all the important natural resources of the areas and the rights and responsibilities that the land trust has and the property owners have in keeping the land protected forever in its current state. So those might be agricultural easements, it might be a forever wild easement, it might be protecting a field or a forest land, some mix of things. The members of the trust are very involved in the work. How do they get involved? What do they do? We rely totally on volunteers with our land trust which is unusual. We have 15 board members who are all volunteer and about 30 volunteer stewards who actually adopt a property and go out and monitor it every year and make sure things are in compliance with the easements and make sure that there aren't any changes or to track any changes that are occurring. And so volunteers are a really important part of our organization. We rely fully on them and we have a really dedicated group and if anybody's interested in participating, we'd love to have them join us. And where are we today and who are we waiting for? Today we are at the Payson property on the Cumberland foreside. It is a 100-acre property with 3,000 feet of shore frontage, fields and forests. It's a beautiful stunning scenic property here in Cumberland and we are with Carol Steingart from Coastal Encounters and she's going to be teaching us about the horseshoe crabs that come up from the shores to mate and lay their eggs here on the beach. Carol, tell us a little bit about the history of the horseshoe crab. Well, how far back do you want to go? We're talking 445 million years old. The horseshoe crab has been on planet Earth. Before man, before dinosaurs, before everything. Well, before dinosaurs. About twice as long before dinosaurs. There wasn't much in the ocean at that time. There were some jellies, sea jellies. Sharks came after that. So there really wasn't much in the ocean at that time. And talk a little bit about them. What are the horseshoe crabs for people who don't know? Horseshoe crabs are actually not true crabs at all. They are more related to the spider, the scorpion, the tick and the mite. They have been around for a long, long time. They live anywhere from Maine to Mexico. They're very generalist types of creatures. They live in a variety of salinities, temperatures, food sources. I mean, it's an amazing span. What role do they play in the overall ecology? When they come ashore to lay their eggs between mid-May and mid-June along the eastern seaboard, especially in Delaware, Cape May, New Jersey, they lay, one female can lay up to 100,000 eggs in the sand up at high tide. And they have this amazing relationship with the shorebirds that are coming up, especially the red knot and a lot of shorebirds that are going from the southern tip of South America to the northern Canadian Arctic to nest up there. And they do a stopover in Delaware and Cape May in that area because they're basically starving to death. They've flown all that way, and they need to double their body weight in a period of two weeks. So what they do is they land there, and they feed for two straight weeks on horseshoe crab eggs, which are very, very tiny green eggs in sand. We call them green eggs in sand. And they double their body weight, and they are big and fat. And sometimes they can't even get off the ground, but they are able to eventually get up to the Canadian Arctic to do their nesting thing. So they are very, very important to the shorebirds. And how many of the horseshoe crabs eggs survive that? Out of 100,000 eggs, only 10 will survive to adulthood. And today, they're coming ashore here in Cumberland. How do they know to come out today? And how do you know that they're going to be here today? Good question. If we were here yesterday, they probably wouldn't be coming. They're kind of like humans. They don't like to go out in the cold. They don't like to be out in the heavy waves when it's raining. They like sunshine. They like good conditions. Certainly warm temperatures are really what made them come ashore. And just nice, calm conditions and good sunshine. And you're going to be hosting and doing a little teaching to talk about them. Is that right? Yes, I am. And I am going to tell people that there is an amazing story to be told about the biomedical use of horseshoe crabs. And it's in their blood. It's in their blue blood. It was not until the 1950s a scientist at Woods Hole by the name of Frederick Bang made this amazing discovery, absolutely amazing discovery. And he found out that the horseshoe crab blood, which happens to be blue, copper-based blood, we have our blood is iron-based. They have special qualities. And living in the ocean, which is basically a sea soup full of bacteria, incredible amounts of bacteria. In their cells, their blood cells, which are comprised of amoeba sites, they have little detectors in their cells that can detect a really nasty bacteria called gram-negative bacteria. And gram-negative bacteria is the kind that we know more commonly as staph infections, sepsis, spinal meningitis, toxic shock syndrome. A lot of the really nasty bacterial infections that we get as humans that could cause high fever and often death, the horseshoe crab blood can actually detect it down to the 1 trillionth of a gram. And nothing else in this world today has been able to detect it to that extreme amount, to that extremely small amount. And so they use the horseshoe crab blood to detect the presence of this endotoxin, the gram-negative bacteria, in anything that gets injected or implanted in our bodies. So if you've had a vaccine, you've had a shot, you're a diabetic, anything injected or implanted if you've had an artificial limb, a knee, a hip, a stent. Everything that gets implanted or injected in our bodies today is first tested with horseshoe crab blood. You spent a lot of time studying the horseshoe crabs. You're obviously fond of them, enamored of them. What's the best thing about them? I just think they're so darn cute. No, actually, I think they're cute. But what I find amazing after all these years of being on planet Earth, they don't pinch, they don't sting, and they don't bite. They are totally harmless creatures. And that in itself is amazing to have lasted that long for 445 million years. And so it's just for me to be able to teach small children and adults that these creatures are totally harmless and they're helping us to stay healthy and germ-free. It just feels like a mission that I need to pursue in my life.