chapter 5, “Enmeshed,” considers habitat and space as meaningful, albeit in different ways, to horseshoe crabs and humans. Using Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects—global warming, in this instance—as a backdrop in this chapter,36 I explain how site fidelity and reclamation projects increase the vulnerabilities of both species. As access to shoreline and coastal habitats are under threat, both crabs and humans must adapt to changing environmental stressors.
Site fidelity refers to horseshoe crabs remaining faithful to, and to returning to, their specific spawning ground year after year to breed. Their site fidelity both increases their vulnerability to harvesting and makes them an excellent species for field biologists to study—you know where to find them. Musing on the term and behavior of site fidelity, I describe the ecological land/seascapes of horseshoe and human habitats in decline and how horseshoe crabs become a sentinel species for human interpretation of ecological health.
This chapter also examines the practice of reclamation, which refers to human engineering to change lakes, rivers, oceanfront, or marshes into usable land. Habitat destruction through reclamation projects such as beach armament and embankment destroy geomorphical continuity. For example, in Japan more than half of Japanese beaches are covered by artificial structures to address sea-level rise, to fortify shorelines for tsunami protection, or to extend the coastline outward and backfill to create industrial, agricultural, or residential land. Globally by 2025, it is predicted that 75% of all human populations will live at the coastline. This massive concentration of population at the coast as sea levels rise creates conditions for hot, sour, and breathless bodies of water. Algal blooms will continue to suffocate seas, with hypoxia and acidification of the oceans, combined with runoff of heavy metals and pesticides into the sea, creating conditions that are toxic to horseshoe crabs. According to Mattei, it isn’t egg predation that is killing urban horseshoe crab eggs—it is contamination: Eggs are poisoned by lead and other pollutants. Juvenile crabs also suffer from lack of food sources owing to contamination. Horseshoe crabs’ long maturation process means that a single “missed” generation could have massive population effects. Creating a “living shoreline,” or urban estuaries, is one possible solution that I discuss in this chapter.
In the conclusion, “From the Sea,” I speculate on the future of the horseshoe crab. I also consider its remarkable ability to survive as a species for millions of years, and I make a case for its continued persistence. Furthermore, I also suggest that the sentinel data that we are generating from studies of horseshoe crabs and habitat destruction might actually indicate that it is humans who have more to fear from our engineering of the shorelines than horseshoe crabs. I end with a reminder of the themes that were explored throughout this book.
Over my lifetime, and more intensely and carefully over the last 4 years, I’ve probably handled thousands of horseshoe crabs. I’ve dug for their eggs, flipped them over, and followed them in the shallow surf, trying to keep pace with them as they glide out to sea. I love the feeling of holding active older crabs; as I slip my hands underneath their bodies, they grab onto me as if they are hugging my hands, and I feel that we are physically connecting. Their gripping is reassuring to me. And as I demonstrate in this book, I’m also implicated (as are you) in their capture, relocation, and bloodletting. I feel responsible to represent these nonhuman others, unlike other research subjects or informants, in ways that garner compassion, concern, and action from humans. At the same time, I must admit a certain quality of relief in that these subjects don’t talk back. Both literally and figuratively, I hold the crabs and their stories in my hands. They can’t talk back to me in a way that I can completely comprehend, but I must muster all my skills of observation and interpretation, as Carl Shuster suggests, to understand both the material and symbolic lives of horseshoe crabs as well as our becoming with them.
2
Endangered
Anyone vaguely knowledgeable about horseshoe crabs immediately and dramatically proclaims that they are hundreds of millions of years old.1 Even the popular media fetishizes time with respect to horseshoe crabs. For example, people interviewed for the National Geographic Wild film Alien Crab claim that “dinosaurs saw the same species I am seeing” and “these ancient mariners crawled under the feet of Brontosaurus.” Truthfully, I have been told that horseshoe crabs have phylogenetic roots in the Cambrian Period and that fossils have been dated from the Upper Ordovician so many times that I have often feigned understanding the significance of this lineage and mustered what I thought to be the requisite astonishment. I have been shown charts to see what Cambrian means and how the geologic divisions of time—eons, epochs, eras, and periods—differ. During the Cambrian, horseshoe crabs—or more specifically, their distant relatives—were living among sponges and algae, some other marine invertebrates, and other arthropods, but there were no hominids. But once I walk away from these charts and my enthusiastic lecturers, I often quickly forget the ordering of this time, as if all were erased.
Illustration of the geologic time scale. Illustration by C. Ray Borck, 2016.
For me, understanding horseshoe crabs has meant getting a grip on my idiosyncratic, socially functional, and personally rewarding relationship with time. If we’re going to consider the horseshoe crab, as I have often been told, we’ll need to take a few steps back (and a deep breath) to understand the big picture and context of the crab’s existence; the implications of a species being labeled vulnerable, threatened, or endangered; and the process of being identified as a species. This chapter examines how, in addition to understanding horseshoe crabs in geologic time, we are forced to confront the destroyer-rescuer role that humans play. I am grappling here with geologic time and the contrasting time scales of the species—humans and horseshoe crabs. I argue that, in apprehending the horseshoe crab, humans experience enchantment, the magical interruption of route mindless repetition. At the same time I relate the crab directly to some very hard truths about our present ecological moment, including our being complicit in mass extinctions and horseshoe crab endangerment.
* * *
Since starting this project, I think of my life as before and after horseshoe crabs. Before horseshoe crabs, time was either immediately personal and measured in task-based increments or generational and measured in interactions with my parents, kids, or students. My everyday simplistic relationship with time was in the human, immediate, and egotistical sense, based on what I could personally experience. And it’s a good relationship from my perspective. My entire life I have been described as a fast person, a quick talker, an impressive multitasker, a speedy walker. I’ve always felt that time was similar to money: something to be thoughtfully spent, conserved for desired things, and managed to lead to optimal outcomes (e.g., doing laundry while making dinner as I entertained a toddler with pots and pans meant more time for reading a novel). Pride swells whenever someone says, “Whoa, you are such a good time manager,” or “I can’t believe how fast you are,” or “You get so much done.” And perhaps somewhat inhumanly, I’ve never truly empathized with the explanation “I didn’t have enough time.” In my more grandiose moments, I believe I can control time.
I admit that historical thinking, for me, has been of the generational nostalgic variety. I am susceptible to glamorizing a past as less complicated, kinder, slower. I drift into visions of an unspoiled, pastoral, bucolic landscape of harmony.2 Yet this peaceable kingdom is always a past where humans existed and where I place my species-specific facsimile into a (not so) distant past. In the same vein, as part of my gender location and racial privilege, I can also lapse into idealizing decades or centuries ago as being so much safer and simpler.
There is also the familial time of experiencing and then watching childhood. Reflecting on the gendered norms of my own childhood, I often tell my daughters how I was able to be a lanky, boyish girl playing soccer with a bad perm, scraped knees, and tube socks
