Word: crabs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
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...
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...
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...