In Love with the Horseshoe Crab

 

The Atlantic horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus in scientific terms, is a crustacean,  but not a crab at all. Its ancestry extends back 450 million years, long before dinosaurs showed their faces. Their primitive, sharp spiky appearance is thought by some people to be fearsome, but they are some of the gentlest creatures in the sea.

The horseshoe crab's brown exoskeleton is divided into the domed head hinged to the flattened abdomen, and linked to its pivoting spike-like tail, which it uses to right itself if flipped over by waves or other action. Females are about half again as large as males, who frequently clamp themselves to the females' abdomens to ensure successful mating, and are towed along in her daily activities.  Using their five pairs of legs, four of them clawed, they walk and swim in a graceful gliding motion along the sandy bottoms of warm-water bays searching out worms and small mollusks. Having many eyes, but poor eyesight, they frequently bump into the feet of shell collectors, waders, and barefooted fishermen, back off, and move along on a new path.

As a teenager snorkeling in the bays of Long Island I often came across horseshoe crabs and grasping them by the tail could feel their muscular body striving to set themselves right. Unlike feisty blue crabs that snip with their claws at the slightest provocation, the horseshoe crab's defense is to curl itself into a C-shape to protect its more delicate undersides – including the leafs of its book-like gills. When set back on the sand bottom they never retaliated, but instead glided away in its search for tender morels.  

In recent years the numbers of horseshoe crabs have dwindled due to their use by eel fishermen as chunk bait, the use of their blue blood in medical research resulting in as large as a 30% mortality and, of  course, habitat degradation. But at least in the last year I have observed more horseshoe crabs, particularly on Cape Cod, than in the past few.

Their harmless lifestyle has always attracted me to horseshoe crabs and I somehow hoped the feeling was mutual. Last spring I was fishing for schoolie striped bass in the sandy tidal creek behind First Encounter Beach on Cape Cod. The fish were sparse, as they had been for most of the season, but the weather was beautiful, and the gulls, and even an osprey, soared overhead in the brisk breeze. It was then I spotted a lone female horseshoe crab coasting through the shallows. Judging from the crop of algae and barnacles that carpeted her carapace this lady had combed the tidal stream for several seasons, and carried with her great horseshoe crab wisdom.

I stopped casting for a few moments to watch her prod along the shore and fade into the chalky deeper water. A few minutes later she made her second appearance, her identity confirmed by her definitive algae crop. This time I sensed a chemical, maybe even an emotional connection between us, which I took as a flirting effort on her part, after all, she was a timeless beauty. I responded by saying, "You are looking exceptionally ravishing this afternoon." She countered by flaunting everyone of her nine beautiful eyes and flashing a delightful smile. She then moved off into the incoming current and headed into the marsh.

It may all have been a product of my imagination, but the horseshoe crab, with its ancient ancestry and  graceful harmless lifestyle, deserves a chance to survive the upcoming decades, maybe a century, or a millennium, or even another hundred million years or so.