sociologist, my method of investigating these questions is to be with the crabs and the people who work with them. In the summer of 2015, I attended the Third International Workshop on the Conservation of the Horseshoe Crab in Sasebo, Japan. I share my field notes from the first day:
Fighting my bleary-eyed jet lag and fitful sleep on a tatami mat, I finger through my registration packet for the Third International Workshop on the Science and Conservation of the Horseshoe Crab. I am sitting on a generic conference chair in a hotel ballroom in Sasebo, Japan, scoping out the fellow humans. Attending mostly sociology and gender studies academic meetings in my professional life, where colleagues routinely complain about the lack of heterogeneous representation, it is interesting to see such a diverse audience of humans. I’m not sure there is any one dominant ethnic group in this crowd of natural scientists, conservationists, ecologists, and wildlife educators. I smile at the man next to me, looking down at his name tag—Jaime Zaldívar-Rae, Anahuac Mayab University, Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. He nods to the stage, as opening remarks are just beginning. A slightly hunched Japanese man in a loose-fitting suit is helped up the steps.
The 87-year-old Mr. Keiji Tsuchiya is a former middle school teacher who dedicated his life, in part, to horseshoe crab conservation. He is a founding member of the Nippon Kabutogani wo Mamoru Kai (Japanese Society for the Preservation of the Horseshoe Crab). During his presentation, Mr. Tsuchiya speaks about the origin of his “love” for horseshoe crabs. As a 17-year-old drafted soldier, working off the shore of Hiroshima, he recounts through a female translator, “I saw a flash, heard loud sounds, and saw a mushroom cloud, and then all the sudden it was very dark and I could only smell burning.” Once he arrived on the shoreline, Tsuchiya navigated through the burning structures to help line up victims side by side and vividly recalls the cries of “Give me water, sir.” Pausing dramatically to choke back tears, Tsuchiya shares, “I can still hear the words of victims in their last moments begging for water.”
After the recovery efforts, he continued his career training to be a middle school teacher.
Then in 1961, he witnessed 10,000 crabs dying on the beach because they missed the tides to return to the sea. This experience made a serious and lasting impression on Tsuchiya. He joined the Kasaoka-shi Kabutonagi Conservation Center, where he worked for many years. Although I speak no Japanese, his passion is obvious as he grips the podium: “This mass horseshoe crabs death occurred because they were drying out and asking for water.” Raising his finger, he continues, “This memory of the atomic bomb where people were asking for water sounded just like the horseshoe crabs to me. ‘Water, water, please give me water, sir.’ It is the same. And since I have dedicated my life to love and conserve horseshoe crabs and to being a nuclear-free peace activist.” He then steps aside from the podium and says in English, “I love horseshoe crabs.” Two hundred international horseshoe crab experts jump to their feet and applaud.
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The purpose of Catch and Release is to examine the myriad ways horseshoe crabs dramatically merge with human lives and how these intersections steer the trajectory of both species’ lives and futures. Again and again, I illustrate how we are enmeshed. Sometimes, as in the experience of Mr. Tsuchiya, intraactions are framed in the spirit of a companion species—but overwhelmingly, as explored throughout the book, horseshoe crabs are constructed and used as an exploitable resource. And still horseshoe crabs have a mighty past, suggesting a certain invulnerability, whereas comparatively humans are temporary. More on this later.
I detail Mr. Tsuchiya’s story because I was and continue to be struck by how he puts horseshoe crabs on the same ontological plane as humans—both are worthy of similar grief. I could imagine some people finding this strange. To many, the comparison between human victims of a notorious nuclear bomb with beached, drying out horseshoe crabs can seem outrageous or callous. Standing in the ballroom, I did find myself looking around at those applauding and wondering if any of them thought it a strange opening to the meeting. These were mostly scientists, after all—pragmatic, humanist, positivist. Most of them were accustomed to using horseshoe crabs as research objects where pain and death were possible outcomes. And yet it was clear the audience was touched—emotionally in sync with Mr. Tsuchiya’s story and able to tap into a sense of compassion for the crabs and their struggles.
One of the humans in that audience was the biologist Bob Loveland. During a smaller meeting in New York City, Bob explained the modern periodization of the horseshoe crab. The first threat to the horseshoe crabs occurred at the beginning of the last century, when the local populations of crabs began to decline precipitously. In the United States, horseshoe crabs were hand harvested and ground up for agricultural use until being replaced by chemical fertilizers in the 1950s.23 After a measurable dip in their numbers, the population bounced back in the 1970s. Today, harvesting horseshoe crabs for use in agricultural fertilizer industry is no longer practiced in the United States.
The second threat began in the 1990s and is ongoing. Crabs are caught by fishermen to use as bait for eels (Anguilla rostrata) and whelks (Busycon carica and Busycotypus canaliculatum) and are worth an impressive 5 dollars each.24 In the United States, the harvesting of crabs is supposedly controlled, limited and managed through a patchwork of intra- and interstate regulations including those by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission and the Gulf States Marine Fisheries Commission. Despite these regulatory apparatuses, many of my informants believe there is great variability in enforcement, and as a result, there are several reports of a black market in horseshoe crabs.
The third and not insignificant threat to horseshoe crabs is their harvest for biomedical use. The crab’s blood is used to create Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL). Since the 1970s, in order to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for any pharmaceutical product such as injectable, implantable, or biological/medical devices, there must be an LAL test conducted to detect any possible bacterial contamination.25 These tests have become biomedical standards in mandated pharmaceutical testing protocols. There are fears of international poaching of North Atlantic horseshoe crabs as Asian species dwindle and biomedical demand grows. Currently in the United States, for biomedical purposes, horseshoe crabs are caught, bled, and released. As discussed at the meetings in Japan, since there is no catch-and-release practice in China, crabs are caught and bled to death. I call this catch and kill. Once the Asian horseshoe crabs are extinct, some researchers worry, there is potential for a black market in North American horseshoe crab blood and international poaching.26 (This use of horseshoe crabs is explored in chapter 4.)
The fourth threat to crabs is the loss of habitat occurring through what Loveland identifies as the “ongoing sea level rise and our response to it.” Horseshoe crabs are a type of sentinel species signaling the strain of environmental stressors, the rapidity of ecological degradation, and how human engineering might exacerbate downward trends.
Intraspecies Mindfulness with Horseshoe Crabs
A large part of my qualitative research over 4 years has been working at Plumb Beach as a research assistant to Mark Botton, a marine biologist at Fordham University, and Christina Colon, a conservation biologist at Kingsborough Community College. They have taught me how to do census counts of horseshoe crabs. Additionally, they trained me how to assess the quality of a horseshoe crab carapace and how to identify the fouling organisms, or animals, that attach to carapaces. Over the years, I have become friendly with Mark and Christina, and I hope my participation in the fieldwork adds an additional intellectual aspect to their biological and ecological interventions. Over the years, I think I have also developed a skill for quickly finding juvenile horseshoe crabs in the sandy and muddy estuaries, which I describe below.
On the tidal flats at Plumb Beach, collecting juvenile horseshoe crabs in a plastic take-out container as part of a timed count. Photo by Lisa Jean Moore.
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