The New Jersey Shoreline

By Michael Riley

As darkness tenderly drapes itself over Delaware Bay, a soft breeze breaks the lingering heat of a blistering summer day.

Clack-clack-clack.

At first, you hear only a rhythmic clattering, like conch shells clicking in the gentle surf.

Clack-clack.

But if you crouch low near the water's edge, you can see in the shallows of $ the high tide an awesome spectacle that has been recurring since before Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the earth: the mating dance of the horseshoe crab, one of nature's ugliest and kinkiest creatures.

Their annual spawning is a sight so bizarre that it draws voyeurs from distant lands to the sandy shores some twelve miles northwest of Cape May, N.J. Lugging cameras, British journalists fly here to film the fecund scene. Japanese scientists gawk at the colossal display of concupiscence. American entrepreneurs profit from it. Biologists study it, and schoolchildren puzzle over it. Oblivious, the crabs just do their primal thing.

With the full-moon tides each May and June, tens of thousands of crabs swarm ashore like magic. Skittering shadows the size of an elephant's hoof, they mingle in piles along the water's edge. The sandy shoreline becomes the site of a vast, squabbling, tumultuous crab orgy.

Before hitting the beach, some lucky crabs, whose tough, circular shells conjure images of tiny oceangoing Darth Vaders, pair up, with the smaller male crabs locking themselves atop the females' spiny shells 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 200,000 millenniums.

"It's real prehistoric," says Fordham University biologist Mark Botton, a New York Giants cap perched on his curly black hair, as he ambles down the beach just feet from the frenzy. "We call it a random-collision process," he says, describing the orgiastic mating ritual of the world's largest population of horseshoe crabs. "It's just like billiard balls."

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."

Which is a biologist's way of saying horseshoe crabs are repulsive. The scientific name, Limulus polyphemus, loosely translates as "slant-eyed Cyclops." But horseshoe crabs are not really crabs at all. They are arthropods, distant relatives of scorpions and spiders.

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.

On a recent sunny morning, plucky Alison Akke, 15 months old and dressed in a dainty blue sundress, is lugging two horseshoe crabs by their spiny 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."

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 and son Matthew, 8, could not care less about a crab's sex. With a devilish grin, Matthew places a roll of firecrackers under a hollow crab shell and steps away as his father lights the fuse. Ka-boom! That's one way to clear the beach.

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 the bay's eastern shore. "The sandbars are more interesting."

Not really. But what does one do with a horseshoe crab? Plenty, it turns out. Indians once used their tails for spearheads, and farmers have ground up the crabs for fertilizer and for hog and chicken feed. Some locals varnish dead ones for knickknacks, and others chop them up for eel bait.

Jim Finn makes money from the crabs. He runs a small company that converts the crabs' blood into the limulus amoebocyte-lysate test used to detect contamination in drugs and other medical products. Each year Finn pays college students to collect crabs and siphon their rich blue blood, which possesses remarkable clotting properties. After donating their blood, the crabs, no worse for the wear, are tagged and tossed back into the bay.

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."

Sometimes the boys intervene. They comb the beach looking for a female, and once they find one, they pull an unattached male from the water and place him atop the female. Explains Zack: "If he goes off, just push him back on and say, 'Mate!' Then they'll do it." Easy -- but then it should be, after 200 million years.