TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082189/08218900.044

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.4 KB | 152 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.