A Visit To Tory's Cave

Our newly formed, or perhaps want-to-be-formed, Seymour High School Faculty Adventure club consisting of Jim Freund (Assistant Principal), Stephanie Shelinsky (English), Paula Burton (Math) and yours truly (Science) explored Tory's Cave in New Milford CT.  Jim, no relation to Marlin Perkins sidekick on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom but is a former Outdoor Guide, led the expedition.  He explained how the cave got its name during the Revolutionary days when British sympathizers (Torys) used to hide out in the cave.  The cave is one of very few solution formed caves in Connecticut and the only one open to the public.  The passage was narrow and drops into to a larger room capable of holding perhaps a dozen people.

Other Pics

The cave is 55 °F year round and is home to bats during the winter months.  There were none when we visited on November 14th.  There are no stalactites or stalagmites but there is very neat looking flowing marble with a golden hue.  We all really enjoyed exploring the cave and just being in it.  The climax was when we turned off our lights and just listened in the pitch black at the slow dripping of water ever changing the cave.

Afternoon Horseshoe Crab Tagging!

My family and I spent the afternoon, more like a half-hour due to thunder, tagging horseshoe crabs at Sherwood State Park in Westport, CT.  We met in the parking lot for the Park Nature Center with members of Sacred Heart University's Project Limulus who gave a brief introduction and provided instruction.  Project Limulus is a horseshoe crab research project that relies on collecting raw field data such as appearance and size.  Our group did manage to collect and tag some crabs before the thunder.

Horseshoe crabs have been around for well over 300 million years which means they were around when trilobites still roamed the oceans and somehow made through the mass extinctions at the end of the Permian (252 mya) and the more famous but less deadly Cretaceous (65 mya).  They have green blood as they use hemocyanin which is copper-based to carry oxygen rather than hemoglobin which is iron-based like most other animals on Earth.  Another interesting tidbit about horseshoe crab blood is that it contains special cells (ameoboctes) which attach to bacteria and prevent it from entering the body.  Anyway, the activity was both fun and educational.  Thanks Project Limulus.