Word: sanding
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...thought it was cool if they were given a couple of six-packs for winning a beach-volleyball tournament. But times have changed. Last year Sinjin Smith, 32, beach-volleyball's top professional, earned nearly $135,000 for a season of bumping, setting and spiking out there on the sand, and he may do even better this year. Predicts Christopher Marlowe, an ESPN sports commentator and the 1984 U.S. Olympic volleyball-team captain: "Next year a beach-volleyball player will make more than the President of the United States...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...