TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/082189/08218900.044

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 8KB | 136 lines

AMERICAN SCENE, Page 10

The New Jersey Shoreline

Doing Their Primal Thing

When it comes to orgies, these crabs have no peers

By Michael Riley


    As darkness tenderly drapes itself over Delaware Bay, a soft
breeze breaks the lingering heat of a blistering summer day.

    Clack-clack-clack. At first, you hear only a rhythmic
clattering, like conch shells clicking in the gentle surf.

    Clack-clack. But if you crouch low near the water's edge, you
can see in the shallows of the high tide an awesome spectacle that
has been recurring since before Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the earth:
the mating dance of the horseshoe crab, one of nature's ugliest and
kinkiest creatures.

    Their annual spawning is a sight so bizarre that it draws
voyeurs from distant lands to the sandy shores some twelve miles
northwest of Cape May, N.J. Lugging cameras, British journalists
fly here to film the fecund scene. Japanese scientists gawk at the
colossal display of concupiscence. American entrepreneurs profit
from it. Biologists study it, and schoolchildren puzzle over it.
Oblivious, the crabs just do their primal thing.

    With the full-moon tides each May and June, tens of thousands
of crabs swarm ashore like magic. Skittering shadows the size of
an elephant's hoof, they mingle in piles along the water's edge.
The sandy shoreline becomes the site of a vast, squabbling,
tumultuous crab orgy.

    Before hitting the beach, some lucky crabs, whose tough,
circular shells conjure images of tiny oceangoing Darth Vaders,
pair up, with the smaller male crabs locking themselves atop the
females' spiny shells with special pincers. For many less fortunate
males, who vastly outnumber the females, the frenzy is more like
a wretched high school dance: they form a stag line on the beach.
Then, when a female, bearing a suitor on her back, wallows up and
begins to burrow in the sand where she will lay about 4,000 eggs,
as many as 15 lusty males struggle in the waves to pile on. All the
males, their long spiny tails wiggling like primeval Excaliburs,
try to milt (scientific politesse for fertilize) her eggs and so
continue their brutish lineage for another 200,000 millenniums.

    "It's real prehistoric," says Fordham University biologist Mark
Botton, a New York Giants cap perched on his curly black hair, as
he ambles down the beach just feet from the frenzy. "We call it a
random-collision process," he says, describing the orgiastic mating
ritual of the world's largest population of horseshoe crabs. "It's
just like billiard balls."

    Swatting at a bug on his neck, Botton, who has studied the crab
for twelve years, climbs the steps to a shoreline lab, where he is
running an experiment to create horseshoe-crab babies in petri
dishes. Directing a visitor to a microscope, he points out a
wiggling, green horseshoe-crab embryo about the size of a large
pinhead. "The little ones are cute," he concedes. But the parents?
"When they get this big," he says, "it's just difficult to get
emotionally attached."

    Which is a biologist's way of saying horseshoe crabs are
repulsive. The scientific name, Limulus polyphemus, loosely
translates as "slant-eyed Cyclops." But horseshoe crabs are not
really crabs at all. They are arthropods, distant relatives of
scorpions and spiders.

    Delaware Bay's prime breeding beaches are also a burial ground.
Thousands of the crabs lie dead, overturned by breaking waves,
their hollow shells littering the sand like the discarded helmets
of a defeated German battalion. Just yards away, oblivious to the
noxious stench of rotting crabs, migratory shorebirds feast on
exposed crab eggs, consuming about 100 tons in just a few weeks.

    On a recent sunny morning, plucky Alison Akke, 15 months old
and dressed in a dainty blue sundress, is lugging two horseshoe
crabs by their spiny tails toward the water. Nearby, her mother
Emma, 35, peers at one until it wriggles and then gingerly hauls
it away. She and her daughter line up the crabs, side by side,
along the beach just above the incoming tide. Besides saving some
crabs, they have also tidied the sand, once littered with
topsy-turvy animals. Quips Alison's mom: "Instead of mowing my
grass, I come out here and clear my beach."

    Theresa Tierney, sweating from her early-morning walk on the
beach, carefully treads past the mating crabs. Each summer Tierney
and her family trade the Philadelphia heat for a bay-front seat at
crab-mating time. As a live crab trundles by her feet, she snatches
it up by its spiny tail to reveal an underbelly of writhing legs
and pulsing book gills. Despite years of such intimate contact with
the crabs, she is still unable to unlock one vital secret. Murmurs
a slightly embarrassed Tierney: "I can't even tell what sex it is."
Her husband Matt and son Matthew, 8, could not care less about a
crab's sex. With a devilish grin, Matthew places a roll of
firecrackers under a hollow crab shell and steps away as his father
lights the fuse. Ka-boom! That's one way to clear the beach.

    Fireworks aside, the horseshoe crab, like the cockroach, seems
designed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Some have withstood a
month without food; others have weathered boat propellers and
bullet wounds. Dave Welsh knows. He's down at Reed's Beach, fishing
with his father. For the umpteenth time since he worked these
waters as a boy, Welsh, now 42, curses and starts reeling in his
line. Nothing biting today except the horseshoe crab. Agitated, he
untangles one from his line and tosses it back. He has few kind
words for the crabs; the fact is, he finds inanimate objects more
provocative. "Each year, you see ten or 20 articles about the
crabs, but you never see any about the sandbars," he bellyaches,
pointing to the tidal flats along the bay's eastern shore. "The
sandbars are more interesting."

    Not really. But what does one do with a horseshoe crab? Plenty,
it turns out. Indians once used their tails for spearheads, and
farmers have ground up the crabs for fertilizer and for hog and
chicken feed. Some locals varnish dead ones for knickknacks, and
others chop them up for eel bait.

    Jim Finn makes money from the crabs. He runs a small company
that converts the crabs' blood into the limulus amoebocyte-lysate
test used to detect contamination in drugs and other medical
products. Each year Finn pays college students to collect crabs and
siphon their rich blue blood, which possesses remarkable clotting
properties. After donating their blood, the crabs, no worse for the
wear, are tagged and tossed back into the bay.

    Late one afternoon, as the spawning crabs are returning to the
water, Zack Gandy and a redheaded pal pace the beach, looking for
late departers. Zack, a ten-year-old imp with a Mohawk haircut,
sits in the sand poking at a live crab with a stick. "I like
watching how they mate," he says, launching into a kid's version
of the birds and the bees on the beach. "He climbs up on her back,
holds on to her tail, puts his claws under her shell and just
mates. That's all I know."

    Sometimes the boys intervene. They comb the beach looking for
a female, and once they find one, they pull an unattached male from
the water and place him atop the female. Explains Zack: "If he goes
off, just push him back on and say, `Mate!' Then they'll do it."
Easy -- but then it should be, after 200 million years.