A few years ago, I went on a boat trip to Fire Island with some researchers who were doing a population survey of horseshoe crabs. Soon after I boarded the boat, on a hot spring morning at a slip in Patchogue, I overheard this conversation:
“Diane, did you have your conga-drum lesson?”
“No, I missed it today. Horseshoe crabs are the only thing that can take me from my congas.”
“Did you bring your drums with you, at least?”
“No, they’re very heat-sensitive. I’d bring them if you could air-condition part of your boat.”
The conga drummer turned out to be a volunteer named Diane SanRomán. On that morning, she wore knee-high rubber boots, a bright-pink cotton shirt, and complicated turquoise earrings: an in-the-field style that became familiar. “My life was good before I discovered horseshoe crabs, but now it’s even better!” she announced to me, adding that she was raising a thousand horseshoe-crab eggs in the bathroom of her apartment, in Manhasset, and that her husband, a doctor who specializes in clinical nutrition, kindly put up with them. Along with playing conga drums, she throws pots and is pursuing her second M.A., in experimental psychology with a focus on marine biology. She looks enough like the late Bea Arthur, the star of the nineteen-seventies sitcom “Maude,” that it would be negligent not to say so.
Of all the horseshoe-crab people I’ve met, Diane is the most enthusiastic and devout. She watches out for horseshoe crabs constantly. If poachers are seen in New York City waters with a boatload of nine hundred horseshoe crabs taken from Jamaica Bay, where you’re allowed to take almost none, Diane sends out a group e-mail with the story. Ditto if the price of horseshoe crabs used for bait by eel and conch fishermen goes up to five dollars per horseshoe crab, or if a shipping crate of horseshoe crabs of unknown origin and destination appears at J.F.K. airport, or if the Zoological Survey of India expresses concern over the dwindling horseshoe-crab population in the Bay of Bengal. With no previous training as a scientist, Diane learned enough about horseshoe crabs to make a presentation at a marine-biology workshop in San Diego in 2013, and she is preparing a study on horseshoe-crab behavior for a gathering in Japan in 2015.
That day on Fire Island, we saw very few horseshoe crabs. The waves were too high, Diane said. Among horseshoe crabs’ main predators are seagulls, which tear out their insides if they get turned over on their backs onshore. In high waves, horseshoe crabs go through gyrations to keep their carapaces upward, and they generally don’t venture toward shore when the surf is rough.
Sometimes I went looking for horseshoe crabs on my own in New York City. At a beach in Staten Island where I’d heard there were many of them, I saw a rippled sand bottom, seaweed fragments rocking back and forth, and a single horseshoe crab swimming through the shallows in a meandering, lonesome way. Diane had told me that she participated in horseshoe-crab population surveys at a place in Brooklyn called Plumb Beach. On a May evening, I drove there, taking the Belt Parkway to Exit 9, per her directions. I came off the Belt at the Plumb Beach parking lot and parked and walked down to the waves. Compared with other beaches, the place was hopping.
A moon as big and orange as a whaling float had just come up over the Rockaways, the sand peninsula that partly shields Plumb Beach from the ocean; the moon’s reflection, a line of wavering dimples that increased in size as they got closer, stretched across the inlet, about a mile wide. This is the kind of sheltered embayment that horseshoe crabs like. They wait to spawn until the water temperature gets above fifty degrees, and they prefer a high tide that coincides with a full-moon or a new-moon night. Already a number of them were in the shallows. From above, a horseshoe crab looks like a somewhat rusty Second World War tin-pot Army helmet. John Rowden, of the Audubon Society, which organized this survey in affiliation with Cornell University and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, wore green rubber boots and carried an aluminum clipboard. Eight or ten volunteers, most of them college-age, stood around him for instructions. Diane carried a square plastic frame that measured a metre on a side. She wore a bright-orange shirt, round silver earrings that were circles within circles, and a headlamp.
A guy who said his name was Allen came down the shore right behind me. To the group at large, he said, “I just dropped my mother off at Sheepshead Bay, and I stopped at the parking lot to smoke a cigar, and somebody asked if I was here for the horseshoe crabs, and I said, ‘No, but what the hell, I’ll stick around!’ I got my camera—maybe make some horseshoe-crab porno movies!”
“It can get pretty wild here during a spawning event,” John Rowden confided, when Diane introduced me. “One night last year, we were doing the survey, and there happened to be three or four models in bikinis here for a fashion shoot just at twilight, and the moon was full like it is now. When the horseshoe crabs started spawning, the models got kind of giddy and tore off their bikinis and went running through the waves.”
The dusk deepened, the moon rose higher. A few non-volunteering spectators showed up—a woman in a fur coat, her beautiful daughter, and a young man carrying a bicycle wheel. Farther along the beach, Russian fishermen stood beside their belled fishing poles, impassive and unimpressed as only Russians can be. They had lit fires of damp straw to keep the bugs away; the sharp-smelling smoke coiled around. Spawning was now in full flower. Male horseshoe crabs are smaller than females, and when they spawn the male grasps the back of the female’s carapace with boxing-glove-shaped front pincers and hangs on. The female works herself into wet sand at the waterline, lays a cluster of some thousands of eggs, moves a short distance up, and lays more. The attached male fertilizes the eggs, as do other males, sometimes four or five or more, crowding around the pair. Mating pairs and satellite males now filled the shallows, moonlight glistening on their carapaces. In places, the wet sand seemed to be cobbled with them.
Volunteers paced off sections of the beach, taking a certain number of steps along the shallows, laying down their metre-square frames, and counting the males and females in the frame. Then they took another so many steps and repeated the process. John Rowden followed, writing down the data. When the counting was complete, and the moon overhead, he used a battery-powered hand drill to make small holes in the carapaces of about a dozen horseshoe crabs so he could attach tags to them. The tags had a phone number to call if the animal was found, so the survey could study how far horseshoe crabs travel after spawning. A small cork on the drill bit kept it from going in too far, but one of the volunteers, an older Asian lady, could not bear to watch. She refused to hold the horseshoe crab. “That’s O.K., Mrs. Wu,” Rowden said. “You don’t have to. No pressure.”
The tide started to go out, and the horseshoe crabs became fewer. Diane walked the high-water line looking for any that had got turned over in the fray. By the light of her headlamp, she showed me a small male. The front part of the horseshoe crab’s helmetlike carapace, called the prosoma, attaches to a lower part, called the opisthosoma, which would be like the helmet’s neck guard. The juncture of the parts is hinged, and the opisthosoma moves up and down, providing a swimming motion. The pointed tail resembles a file and is called the telson. It connects to the opisthosoma by means of an almost universal joint. If the animal becomes upside down, the telson moves all around in an attempt to lever it onto its legs. Diane held the horseshoe crab with her hands on each side of the prosoma. “Never pick up a horseshoe crab by the telson,” she cautioned.
We looked more closely at the horseshoe crab’s underneath. Six pairs of spidery, multi-jointed legs radiated from the center, where both the mouth and the brain are. The brain is doughnut-shaped and encircles the mouth. The legs did a kind of slow-motion random insectoid running-in-place as Diane lifted the animal to show its gills—called book gills, because they resemble bound pages—which are also underneath, below the legs. Turning it upright again, she pointed out the large eyes on either side of the prosoma. Horseshoe crabs have a lot of eyes, and the species name, Limulus polyphemus, derives from some of them. The two large eyes can be construed as squinting; hence Limulus, which means “squinting or aslant” in Latin. A pair of smaller eyes on top of the prosoma are so close together they might be mistaken for a single eye; hence polyphemus, from the Cyclops.
Diane handed the wet, sand-covered male to me and I carried it to the water. Held upright, it felt like a closed cardboard box with something alive moving around inside. Meanwhile, she found a large female that had gone far up the beach and was headed in the wrong direction. “Why doesn’t she know to go back, and out with the tide, like everybody else?” Diane asked, returning the female to the waves. “Sometimes these animals seem sharp as a tack and sometimes they have no clue.”
The cars on the Belt Parkway, no more than fifty yards from the water in some places, sped as madly as before. Sirens passed and faded, the bass reverbs of car stereos went pulsing by. Along the shore, you could still see a few volunteers looking into the dark water with their headlamps, bent over the small pools of blue-white light at their feet.
Horseshoe crabs are aliens from another planet, if we allow that the other planet was Earth about five hundred million years ago. Creatures much like horseshoe crabs go back that far or farther, to almost the beginnings of animal life. The earliest known horseshoe-crab fossils are four hundred and eighty-five million years old. The land then was bare rock without plants, except for some algae and tiny mosses along the watercourses. All animal life was in the oceans; millions of years passed before any animals lived on land. The oldest fossils of land animals date to between four hundred and twenty million and four hundred and ten million years ago, and they are of the horseshoe crab’s relatives—scorpions, spiders, and insects. All belong to the phylum Arthropoda, the most populous phylum, which has more than a million species. True crabs are also of that phylum, but their class is Crustacea, while horseshoe crabs are of the class Chelicerata. That is, horseshoe crabs are not crabs.
In the fossil record, the nearest ancient relatives of horseshoe crabs are the trilobites, a successful group for hundreds of millions of years. Because trilobites had shells made mostly of calcium carbonate, they fossilized better than horseshoe crabs, whose shells are composed of chitin. Most trilobites had ovoid, segmented bodies that would make good paperweights. The last species of trilobites disappeared in the Permian Extinction, between two hundred and fifty-two million and two hundred and fifty million years ago. Horseshoe crabs survived that extinction and the others—at least a dozen extinctions in all. Having exoskeletons of chitin rather than of calcium carbonate may have helped during times when the oceans acidified. Horseshoe crabs can tolerate low-oxygen water and other life-killing conditions. Animal life probably began in the bottom of the sea. Horseshoe crabs still live in the mud and sand at the bottom of shallow inland waters, and on continental shelves out to about a hundred feet deep. They are like our old neighbors who never left our home town.
In 2005, Dr. Dave Rudkin, a paleobiologist at the Royal Ontario Museum, in Toronto, found horseshoe-crab fossils in central Manitoba. At one site, on the shores of Hudson Bay near Churchill, he and his colleagues spalled off thin layers of rock with two-pound sledgehammers while keeping an eye open for polar bears. The fossil horseshoe crabs, to which he gave the name Lunataspis aurora, were no larger than two inches across. From tests of the rock’s isotopes and by comparing index fossils, he could date the horseshoe-crab fossils to the late Ordovician period, about four hundred and forty-five million years ago.
Manitoba lies mostly on the Canadian Shield, part of the North American mid-continental core that has remained geologically stable for much longer than five hundred million years. In the late Ordovician, it was in the subtropics, near the equator, and a shallow sea spread across its central region. It was moving away from Rodinia, the supercontinent it had been a part of. Eventually, it re-collided with other continents to form the supercontinent Pangaea, which in turn split apart, about two hundred and ten million years ago. North America reached its present position on the planet about twenty million years ago, in the middle Cenozoic. Unlike more recent arrivals, horseshoe crabs might have ridden North America here.
Lunataspis aurora did not fall prey to birds, because there weren’t any, and wouldn’t be any for hundreds of millions of years. Horseshoe crabs saw the aeons come and go. In the Carboniferous period, when most bacteria able to digest wood had not yet evolved, a planetary reservoir of plant carbon was buried and became coal. The remains of Euproops, another early horseshoe-crab species, have been found in fossilized feces in coal deposits in England. A species of horseshoe crab that scientists named Limulus coffini because of its close resemblance to the Limulus of today became a fossil in eighty-million-year-old rock in Colorado. A horseshoe crab known as Mesolimulus walchi, whose fossils have been found in limestone quarries in southern Germany, preëxisted by fifty million years certain formations of ocean algae that died and fell to the bottom and occupied deeper rock and cooked at the right temperature for millions of years and eventually turned into oil; the kin of Mesolimulus may or may not still be here when all the planet’s oil is gone. Horseshoe crabs have been around at least two hundred times as long as human beings.
“The main problem for horseshoe crabs in Asia is people eating them,” Dr. John Tanacredi told me. A big man with a gray mustache and (sometimes) a soul patch, who favors Hawaiian shirts with palm fronds on them, he is one of the world’s leading experts on horseshoe crabs. We were in Rockville Centre, Long Island, in a room at Molloy College, where he teaches marine biology. In 2004, Tanacredi began organizing the International Workshop on the Science and Conservation of Horseshoe Crabs, a group of scientists from America and Asia who hold conferences about the animal every two years. “You can buy horseshoe crab in seafood markets in Taiwan and Hong Kong,” he continued. “People eat the eggs, too. A Japanese colleague tells me that in Vietnam there are snack carts that sell steamed horseshoe crabs on the beach. Protein is protein, I guess. As an experiment, some students and I tried to make a horseshoe-crab stew one time. It was the worst thing we’d ever tasted. We threw it out and ordered pizza.”
For no reason that scientists can explain, horseshoe crabs are found only on the eastern coasts of North America and Mexico and on the eastern coast of Asia and near environs. Atlantic horseshoe crabs have a range from Maine to Florida, to the Gulf of Mexico and the tip of Yucatán. An estimated nineteen million horseshoe crabs, by far the largest population in the world, live in Delaware Bay. Asian horseshoe crabs are of three species: Tachypleus tridentatus, in southern Japan, the Philippines, and on the central and southern coast of China; Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda, in the western part of the Bay of Bengal, on both sides of the Malay Peninsula, and on the island of Borneo; and Tachypleus gigas, in a range overlapping with that of Carcinoscorpius, but in smaller numbers. All the Asiatic species are in severe decline. Tachypleus gigas seems to be the hardest hit of the three.
“In many parts of Asia, the other disaster is habitat loss, of course,” Tanacredi said. “In Hong Kong, for example, there’s almost no undeveloped shoreline left. On the coast of China, the pollution is becoming too much even for horseshoe crabs. But the numbers here in America are not reassuring, either. Since we started doing local surveys, back in 2001, we’ve seen a decline of about one per cent in the horseshoe-crab population on Long Island every year, for a total drop of about twelve per cent. It’s a scary trend.”
People’s tastes in seafood affect Atlantic horseshoe crabs, too. Some local East Coast horseshoe crabs are exported for tables in Asia. More are consumed at one remove, when fanciers of eels or of scungilli (conchs, also called whelks) buy those foods in stores or restaurants. The best bait for conchs or eels is female horseshoe crab; you take a female, cut it in quarters, and put the pieces in eel pots or conch traps. Suppliers ship conchs and eels internationally, so the global market drives local harvests of bait. Over the past decades, many millions of horseshoe crabs on the East Coast went for bait. When their numbers seemed to be dropping alarmingly, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, or A.S.M.F.C., to which New York and the other Atlantic seaboard states belong, set harvest quotas.
The A.S.M.F.C.’s horseshoe-crab directives require that each member state make an annual census of horseshoe crabs. Going all along the shoreline on spawning nights and counting horseshoe crabs is beyond the means of any state’s department of environmental conservation or fish and game. Ergo: volunteers, or practitioners of “citizen science,” that newly fashionable term. Now on any full-moon night in late May or early June thousands of volunteer horseshoe-crab census-takers like those I’d joined at Plumb Beach descend upon the coast.
Matthew Sclafani, of the Cornell Cooperative Extension in Riverhead, Long Island, oversees the New York State detachment of this army. In his office, he showed me a six-inch-high pile of applications for volunteer positions that he had received already in 2014. “We get hundreds of people who want to count horseshoe crabs,” he told me. “Interesting types—they love horseshoe crabs, they come from all over, they’re retired or they’re young, they’re willing to go out and collect data at one in the morning. The census program helps create local stewards, and it’s great for us and for the state D.E.C., who we contract for, because it gives people an attachment to the resource. Our volunteers know that the data they gather will go directly to conservation. The horseshoe crab is the model species for citizen science. Most marine animals, you have to spend a lot of money and go to difficult or even dangerous extremes to observe them. But horseshoe crabs are easy. What other marine animal comes up by the thousands right onto the beach?”
When Diane walks local shorelines checking on horseshoe crabs, I accompany her sometimes, and try not to wince when she politely asks hard-looking fishermen pointed questions about the horseshoe crabs lying strewn at their feet. If she sees kids hanging out under a bridge, she tells them about horseshoe crabs, and if she comes upon horseshoe crabs tangled in fishing line or seaweed she untangles them, and if she notices some that appear to have been mistreated she documents the injuries by taking photos with her iPhone.
One of her recent photos shows a horseshoe crab that has likely been punctured in the heart and has bled out on the sand. Horseshoe-crab blood is blue. I had never seen it before; unless the heart is pierced, the structure of the animal’s anatomy generally keeps it from serious bleeding. The blue comes from hemocyanin, a copper-containing protein that transports oxygen in the blood, like the iron-containing hemoglobin in red blood. Other animals, including snails, octopuses, and scorpions, have blood with hemocyanin, but you rarely see their blood in a big puddle.
Horseshoe-crab blood is said to be worth fifteen thousand dollars a quart. It contains a unique substance known as limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL, that responds dramatically to the presence of even the tiniest amount of bacterial toxin. LAL is used to test vaccines, I.V. fluids, surgical instruments, artificial implants, and any other medical item that goes under the skin. Some horseshoe-crab experts consider fifteen thousand dollars to be too low an estimate, considering the amount of LAL that may be refined from a quart of blood. Biomedical companies take adult horseshoe crabs that have been caught in the wild, and then workers clean them, strap them to racks, stick needles in their hearts, drain them of about a third of their blood, and, eventually, release them. The crabs are supposed to be put back where they came from, but that doesn’t always happen, according to reports. Mortality rates from the bleeding procedure are unknown; they may be as high as thirty per cent. In 2012, the industry bled about half a million horseshoe crabs. From somewhere in my travels, I acquired a vial of LAL with the brand name of Pyrogent, made by a company called BioWhittaker, in Walkersville, Maryland. The vial, good for one test, contains a small dusting of a white powder-like substance that could fit on the tip of a finger.
The strength of the LAL reaction may be an adaptation related to the animal’s shell. The ocean bottom breeds a lot of bacteria, and a chitinous shell punctures more easily than a mineralized, calcium-carbonate one. If a horseshoe crab’s shell gets a hole in it and bacterial toxins enter, amebocytes, or blood cells, instantly attack the bacteria by spewing enzymes that clot the blood. For a better grasp of how this works, I called Dr. Norman Wainwright, the director of research and development at Charles River Laboratories, a major manufacturer of LAL, with headquarters in Massachusetts. That is, I made calls and then exchanged e-mails with a series of public-relations people associated with Charles River, until a conference call was set up between Wainwright and me, plus Charles River’s director of public relations, who said that she would listen in and “provide insight where needed.”
Dr. Wainwright, who worked with Dr. Jack Levin, one of the two discoverers of the LAL reaction, told me that watching the cells under a microscope is amazing—the way the granules in the amebocytes suddenly pop like popcorn and make a clot around the bacteria. He explained that enzymes in the blood increase the reaction so that each step is a tenfold amplification of the one before, like a chain letter. Recently, he invented a handheld LAL-based device that can detect bacterial toxins chromogenically. You wet a sterilized swab with purified water and rub the swab on whatever you want to test. Then you put the sample in a well in the device and a display changes color if there is contamination. This will be handy for pre-launch testing of spacecraft, which by international treaty must be free of microbes before they are sent into space. (Another, more time-consuming assay is now employed to test spacecraft.) Wainwright said that someday the LAL test could be used to search for microbial life on other planets, and that for this ancient animal’s blood to be a part of space exploration is a remarkable thing.
I asked, by the way, since the enzymes of the LAL reaction are so important to it, and since other natural enzymes have been synthesized in the lab, why couldn’t the same be done with these enzymes; and might somebody be working on a synthetic LAL already? He began to answer, but the Charles River Laboratories director of public relations, who had said nothing so far, declared this subject beyond the scope of the interview. Brought up short, Wainwright and I fell silent, and the conversation petered out.
Synthetic LAL does exist, and a biotechnology company called Lonza sells a version of it under the brand name PyroGene. Other synthetics have been developed and could, in theory, replace natural LAL entirely; for now, industry inertia and the cost of getting F.D.A. approval remain in the way. The next time I saw John Tanacredi, I asked him if it didn’t make sense to raise a lot of horseshoe crabs in captivity anyway, to have a reserve. “You know why I love to work with horseshoe crabs? Because they’re the perfect research animal,” he said. “It may sound silly, but they don’t bite, they don’t take your finger off. They’re not slimy. They’ve got some sharp, nonpoisonous spines on their opisthosomas you have to look out for—that’s about it. Horseshoe crabs don’t harm anything except the small clams and worms they eat. That’s partly why LAL was discovered in the first place. The animals were readily available and no problem to work with. Back in the sixties, a Nobel Prize for research in vision went to optic-nerve research done on horseshoe crabs. The photoreceptors in their eyes are large and easy to study.
“So, yes, it would be great if we could raise them outside their environment,” he continued. “I have horseshoe crabs I’m raising in my lab right now. We’ve brought thousands past their first three or four instars—their first molts—and released them to the wild, but we have no way of knowing what happened to them. Scientists in Hong Kong and Taiwan have done the same. So far, though, nobody has raised a horseshoe crab to adulthood—to sexual maturity, which they reach at about ten years old. These animals can live to be twenty or even thirty. In an artificial environment, no one has kept them alive past the age of about five and a half. So what all this tells me is that we have to work harder to preserve them in the wild. Our international group has been trying to get the U.N. to declare the horseshoe crab a World Heritage Animal. We already have World Heritage Sites—natural and cultural places that UNESCO has declared worthy of preservation. Why not a World Heritage Animal? Giving that designation to horseshoe crabs would provide conservation groups, especially in Asia, with a lot more authority in working to preserve them. The first animals on earth were invertebrates. It would be really cool if this invertebrate became the first World Heritage Animal.”
A spring day at Mispillion Harbor, on the western shore of Delaware Bay about twenty miles south of Dover, out-springtimes almost anyplace. The beaches and the creeks and the broad flats of cordgrass and phragmites are a widespread racket of bird noise, the sky above the shoreline effervesces with fliers, the breezes send ripples over the water and through the reeds. Individuals go streaking by, and long skeins of birds, incoming or outgoing, cross the sky far away. Delaware Bay is one of four main staging areas for migratory birds on the continent, and the beaches of Mispillion Harbor are the bay’s most important sites for migrating shorebirds. As it happens, the millions of adult horseshoe crabs that live in the bay usually are in their spawning phase when the birds arrive. This continental stopover is catered substantially by the horseshoe crabs.
One Memorial Day, on a long excursion, I visited the viewing deck at the DuPont Nature Center, overlooking Mispillion Harbor. Bird-watchers lined its railings with emplacements of telescopes and cameras. Some of the bird-watchers were talking on their cell phones and leaving excited messages for other bird-watchers. When the other bird-watchers called back, the ring tones were birdcalls. Jeffery Davis, a birder from near Philadelphia, offered me a look through his well-positioned 30-power Kowa telescope. Oystercatchers, stilts, dowitchers, willets, black-bellied plovers, dunlins, royal terns, ruddy turnstones, semipalmated sandpipers—along the sand and in the shallows, thousands of heads were going up and down as long, thin bills plucked up what probably were horseshoe-crab eggs. A single horseshoe crab swam nearby on the surface, on its side. Lenses turned to the odd swimmer for half a minute, then went back to the birds.
Jeffery Davis pointed out the red knot, the bird I had come to see. When birds flew up, they went by species—all the oystercatchers in a fluttering bunch, then all the dowitchers, and so on. A bunch of birds with rust-colored bellies and brown legs went up and then came down where the scope was pointed, and he said they were red knots. These are a famous kind of bird. Next to the nature center stood a seven-foot-high statue of a red knot known as B 95, which has completed round-trip migrations of eighteen thousand miles at least twenty times and often stops off here. Red knots spend our winter months in Tierra del Fuego, near the tip of South America, and begin to fly north when the South American winter approaches, at the beginning of our spring. They cross great distances flying at forty or fifty miles an hour and when they get here may have burned off half their body weight.
For unknown millennia, red knots have been re-bulking up along Delaware Bay annually at this time in the spring. During a span of about two weeks, they work the beaches and eat many tons of horseshoe-crab eggs. Then they continue northward to the tundra above the Arctic Circle, where they lay their own eggs in nests in the ground cover, raise their young, then turn south again. Through the scope, some of the red knots already looked plump as they stepped among the other birds and moved their heads briskly. Red knots used to stop off here every spring by the many tens of thousands. Since the nineteen-eighties, their numbers have been going steadily down. An estimated forty-four thousand came in 2013. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to list the red knots as a threatened species, and the proposal is now under public review. A drop in the horseshoe-crab population may be part of the red knots’ problem.
Glenn Gauvry, the president of the Ecological Research and Development Group, describes his organization as the only one in the world whose goal is the conservation of horseshoe crabs. He lives in the tiny town of Little Creek, Delaware, a short drive up the shore from Mispillion Harbor, in a frame house that is also the E.R.D.G.’s headquarters. He came to horseshoe crabs by way of an Army upbringing, service in the Air Force as an air-traffic controller, establishment of a business that made expensive wood furniture for corporate boardrooms, closing of that business, involvement in animal-rescue groups, travel to oil-spill sites all over the world for the rescue of oil-covered animals, survival of a near-fatal illness caused by drug-resistant bacteria, eventual burnout on animal rescue, and reconsideration of his life’s purpose. He is a soft-spoken, limber, Zen-influenced man. We sat and talked in low chairs in his uncluttered living room.
“I had always known about horseshoe crabs,” he told me, “but when I came across them again while cleaning oil off seabirds I was surprised to discover there was no horseshoe-crab advocacy organization—none. So in ’95 I started the E.R.D.G. We have the broadest mission. We talk to the biomed industry and the fishermen and the birders, groups that mostly don’t talk to each other. We establish local horseshoe-crab sanctuaries, try to reduce harvests, gather habitat data, and let people know about these animals. Getting people to care about horseshoe crabs is a hard, hard sell. Millions of people love birds, and you can read long, poetic descriptions of the journey of the red knots. The birders have the influence and the money. When the horseshoe crab enters their consciousness, it’s only as a source of food.”
Gauvry was wearing a loose white shirt, cargo pants, and sandals. He leaned back and took a moment, in a centered way. “As an industrial designer, I’m fascinated with horseshoe crabs,” he said. “Their body plan is configured for success and yet they seem to be built on sacrifice. Look at their suffering. When they meet an obstacle, they overcome it by dying in enormous numbers. They lay billions of eggs but only a tiny percentage become adults, while the rest feed other animals. Fishermen use the bodies of horseshoe crabs, we take their blood for our medicine. I choose to be moved by that. There’s a truth in horseshoe crabs that we must be attentive to. They’ve been around for half a billion years; the jury is still out on us.”
Near Gauvry’s house, a narrow paved road runs through fields of phragmites directly to the bay. I drove to the end of pavement and got out. The tide had receded; acres of dark-brown mudflats featured occasional stuck horseshoe crabs waving their telsons. On the horizon, seven oil tankers with identical silhouettes waited at regular intervals; Delaware Bay is the second-biggest oil-transport waterway in America. Wandering along trails in the shoreline reeds, I found horseshoe-crab fragments by the thousands, among paint buckets, tires, condom wrappers, bricks, Clorox bottles, bushel baskets, six-pack yokes, Sierra Mist cans, tampon dispensers, tail-light fragments, shotgun-shell casings, butterfly-shaped Mylar balloons, and two-by-fours. Next to the carapace of a large horseshoe crab someone had set a battered yellow hard hat, perhaps as visual commentary.
Past an initial puddle, the gravel road going north along the shoreline looked drivable, so I took it. The road skirted the bay so closely that it required a barrier wall of riprap for protection. On the inland side, landing lights for Dover Air Force Base led away and out of sight. Dover is the military’s largest mortuary base, and it appears often in news stories about the return of the bodies of soldiers who died overseas. As I watched, a C-5 transport plane came out of the clouds, so huge and slow it seemed it would drop from the sky. Glenn Gauvry had told me that there was a fuel dock up ahead, and now I saw it—a long pier set apart by barbed-wire fencing and studded with warning signs. Ocean tankers unload airplane fuel there, he said, and it flows through a pipeline system to the base.
The crumbling brittle of horseshoe-crab parts under the car wheels now became so thick it was unnerving, with uncrushed, whole horseshoe crabs all over the road as well. I pulled onto the left-hand berm to investigate. When I climbed up on the riprap wall, I saw throngs of stranded horseshoe crabs lying in the interstices among the rocks. The carnage stretched into the distance and had a major-battlefield air, reminiscent of the Mathew Brady photograph of the dead at the Sunken Road at Sharpsburg. Some of the horseshoe crabs seemed to be moving feebly. The ones on the road had evidently managed to make it past the rocks.
A blue car came driving slowly along the road and parked behind my car. A blond, crewcut man wearing a short-sleeved shirt got out, followed by two boys. The boys bounded onto the rocks and went along them checking the horseshoe crabs, picking up any that showed signs of life, and carefully putting them back in the water. “This is an annual thing for my sons and me,” the man said, climbing up beside me. “The Air Force built this rock barrier to protect the road, because it’s important to the fuel pier and to the base. The beach that used to be here was perfect for the crabs, so naturally I guess they keep trying to spawn here. We come out and try to save the ones we can. Most of the crabs here are dead. This beach is a total loss for them, and we keep hoping that next year they’ll get the message, but so far they haven’t.”
Plumb Beach, where I’d first seen horseshoe crabs spawning, looked different every time I went back. Because of its easy access from the Belt Parkway, I visited it often. It is a wild place—one of those ungovernable margins of the city where the wildness of nature coincides with human wildness and a sense of chaos prevails. Plumb Beach used to be an island. A neighboring barrier of sand called Pelican Beach, which shifted around at the eastern end of Coney Island, protected Plumb Island from sea currents incoming from Rockaway Point. In the late eighteen- or early nineteen-hundreds, Pelican Beach disappeared—dredged up or washed away, no one today remembers—letting the currents in. Just west of Plumb Island, in Sheepshead Bay, some of the richest men in America built shoreline mansions. A non-rich, less presentable element inhabited Plumb Island. To get to it, you had to take a ferry across a tidal channel called Hog Creek, though at low tide you could walk.
In 1940, the city’s Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, made Plumb Island Plumb Beach by filling in Hog Creek with dredged-up sand. Evicting the locals, he then put a mile or so of the Belt Parkway on this stretch of dunes and added a city park beside the eastbound lanes. Moses believed that people should drive on parkways uninterrupted by stoplights to places set aside for the appreciation of nature and healthy outdoor exercise. At Plumb Beach, he created a habitat for chaos instead. A parking lot you could speed into and out of, with isolated dunes beside it, in New York City—what was likely to happen? Plumb Beach became a famous make-out spot, and later a cruising area for older men waiting alone in cars. Drug dealers liked the parking lot’s drive-through convenience. There were murders; a man was stabbed to death in his car. People getting rid of their cats abandoned them at Plumb Beach and a feral-cat population spread through the windblown foliage. Dumped-out trash accumulated and blew here and there in windrows.
In 2006, a designer at the IKEA store in Nassau County drove to the Plumb Beach parking lot to have sex with a man he had met online. The designer brought a blanket so they could lie on the sand. When he arrived, the pickup and three confederates tried to rob him. Struggling with two of them, the designer ended up on the parkway, where an S.U.V. hit him and kept going. One of the attackers went through his pockets before running away. He died a few days later in the hospital. The attackers were caught, tried, and sentenced to up to twenty-one years in prison. The designer’s family and friends put a memorial bench beside the parking lot; his name was Michael Sandy.
Carl Kruger, the local New York State senator, declared Plumb Beach a menace and said it should be closed after dark. He later pleaded guilty to taking bribes in an unrelated matter and went to prison, where he remains. Nor’easters hit Plumb Beach hard and erosion ate so far into the beach that it threatened the parkway. Local citizens called for beach replenishment. They found a champion for their cause in their young congressman, Anthony Weiner.
Eventually, the pollution and trash at Plumb Beach became less bad. The park is part of the Gateway National Recreation Area, which includes most of Jamaica Bay and some of the Staten Island shoreline, so Plumb Beach is partly under federal management. John Tanacredi, who served as Gateway’s eco-toxicologist for five years, remembers seeing horseshoe crabs spawning in the back of a drowned Volkswagen in pre-cleanup days. Theresa Scavo, the chairman of the local community board, who has lived in the area for all her sixty-two years, knew Plumb Beach when refuse filled the shallows. “Trash or no trash—made no difference to the horseshoe crabs,” Scavo told me. “The horseshoe crabs have always been there.”
When I stopped by Plumb Beach four days after the 2012 hurricane, it had been transformed. Blue plastic barrels and dock segments and huge unidentifiable objects—pieces of ships?—had washed onto the dunes and lay like giants’ toys. Sand buried the groves of cottonwoods and ailanthus trees far up their trunks. Shreds of plastic filled their branches. Michael Sandy’s bench sat in sand up to its arms. At the same time, a beach-replenishment project—the final result of Anthony Weiner’s efforts—was going on, overseen by the Army Corps of Engineers and contracted by the Great Lakes Dredge and Dock Company, according to a posted sign. A concrete pipe three feet across extended into the water, where it inhaled sand from a barge offshore. Another set of pipes and hoses applied the sand to the most eroded parts of the beach. At the old suture where Hog Creek used to be, wide expanses of new white sand kept the waves two hundred yards or more from the parkway.
The next year on Memorial Day, I called Diane and asked if she had any idea what the hurricane had done to the horseshoe-crab population. She said she didn’t know yet—spawning wasn’t very far along and nobody had much new data. She suggested we meet at Big Egg Marsh, a beach by the bridge across Broad Channel to the Rockaways, and see for ourselves. When I got there, Diane’s Toyota was already in the horseshoe-crab-shell-strewn parking area. Tonight, her outfit included red rubber boots, jeans, a purple T-shirt, and earrings that were small triangles depending from big triangles.
People of India-Indian heritage from Guyana who now live in Queens often spend time at Big Egg Marsh. At a certain time of year, they perform Hindu ceremonies that involve putting money, flowers, fruit, and little ghee-burning lamps on paper plates and setting them afloat to go out with the tide. Tonight, the Guyanese were only fishing for smelt. Their seine nets, blue and white and orange, flared against the bridge’s tan concrete like sudden spills of paint when they cast them. Planes taking off from J.F.K. went roaring above every few minutes, showing their wide white undersides. Diane and I walked the shore, but only a few horseshoe crabs appeared. She found one that had a tag and she made a note of its number. Another struggled with its legs in a tangle of bright-pink ribbon, perhaps a leftover from the Guyanese ceremonies. Diane gently asked some Guyanese if they would please refrain from putting ribbons in the water, explaining the hazard it posed. The Guyanese nodded and smiled.
Hoping for more action, we then drove to Plumb Beach. The trouble-magnet parking lot had been gated and locked, so we had to park a mile or so away and walk in along the bicycle path. The near part of the beach, closest to the parkway, was now enclosed with orange plastic fencing, and construction equipment and piles of rocks for new breakwalls occupied the site. We continued farther down, to where we’d seen the most horseshoe crabs before, at the eastern end of the beach. In the little marsh between it and the highway, a stadium-sized congregation of birds yacked and called. The lights of cars sped past. The sun set, the dusk deepened, a full moon rose. Horseshoe crabs began to emerge. One after another, and then in bunches, like the helmet tops of surfacing mermen, they came up in the outwash along the smooth wet sand.
Horseshoe crabs in the Northeast seemed to have survived the big hurricane with no major change in their numbers. According to the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, egg densities on horseshoe-crab spawning beaches on the Delaware side of the bay were about the same in 2013 as they had been in 2012. On Long Island, Tanacredi said, the numbers of horseshoe crabs continued to decline at about one per cent over that period, following the recent pattern.
Not long ago, I went with Diane on a chilly walk at Big Egg Marsh—to collect winter data, she said, though there turned out to be nothing much to see besides a few horseshoe-crab parts and the concrete stumps of supports for a now vanished bridge sticking up at lowest tide, their rusted rebars like tousled dreadlocks. Afterward, we got pizza in nearby Howard Beach and then sat by the water at a little park by the Congressman Joseph P. Addabbo Bridge. Seagulls were flying over the parking lot and dropping clams to break them and get at the meat. The view to the west was of islands, with distant Manhattan just another one of them, distinguished only by its dim, vaulting skyline. I asked her how the thousand baby horseshoe crabs in her apartment were doing. “All but a dozen of them died,” she said. “The biggest one I still have is about like this.” She made a coin-sized circle with her finger and thumb. “They molt four or five times in their first year, and that’s the tough part. For some reason, when they molt they die.”
I asked Diane why, after all, she was so interested in horseshoe crabs.
“My husband wonders that,” she said. “Right after the first night when I went on a horseshoe-crab survey, I told him I had found my niche, and he thought I was being comedic. He assumed I would get over it. But my fascination with horseshoe crabs only grew. There’s something about them—they have a deep purpose, a secret knowledge of their imperativeness. I want to understand how they perceive the world. For example, supposedly horseshoe crabs can’t hear—but how do we know? We really have no idea what horseshoe crabs think or what they are doing. They’re mysterious, and they’re also adorable.”
I remembered a famous horseshoe-crab fossil I’d seen pictures of. The horseshoe crab is in a matrix of rock that includes the fossilized imprint of the animal’s final tracks. In some distress, it left a wobbly, winding set of tracks and, at the end of them, died. Its fossil lies at the conclusion of its preserved last pages. Perhaps it found itself in anoxic water and couldn’t get out. But there is sense in what happened to it, a one-thing-after-another set of consequences, as there was, in fact, to everything around it and to all existence after and before. When no human consciousness existed, everything that did exist, including this dying horseshoe crab, had its own story and made its own sense.
Humans may drive horseshoe crabs to extinction, or not. Sea-level rises may cause shoreline reinforcement that wipes out their habitat. Or perhaps there will be even more beaches for them when sea levels rise; probably we won’t be able to reinforce every foot of shoreline. In any case, there will be a future where natural events continue to make their own sense, as they’ve always done, as they will whether we are still here to see the sense in them, or not. Based on past performance, horseshoe crabs may well survive us. Next to the road, where most people never look at them, they show how life goes about living on the actual earth. ♦
