So let me tell you how I think with animals. I see an animal…say, the harbor seal I encountered once while running down a deserted barrier island…I stop dead in my tracks. Pull out my phone to take a picture…(natch)…and then time slows down. I’m aware of the wind, the sun’s position in the sky, the sound the creature makes as it moves. And I marvel that we share this space and yet perceive it so differently…me through the clunky apparatus of language, theory, and anthropomorphizing assumptions…the creature through its own instinctual drives and fears.
Then it’s gone. The seal labors to the surf and disappears beneath the waves. The deer bounds into the forest, her tail becoming a bouncing white feather before I lose sight of her. The prairie dog chirps and scuttles into its hole. But they’re still with me and I’m apt to be haunted by them for years. They show up in poems and sermons, like some patronus of wisdom.
Of course other creatures don’t get such attention. The black flies I smack into a bloody smear on my legs on those same barrier island trips get no love. And the jellyfish that show up in the waters around here mid-summer are similarly unwelcome. They become what Lisa Jean Moore calls “trash animals,” nuisances that we can exterminate or disregard because of their much lower status.
Horseshoe crabs often occupy this rung of the chain of being. But I’ve been fascinated by them since moving to Virginia’s Eastern Shore, just as Moore has been. That’s why a friend gave me Moore’s book to read, Catch and Release: The Enduring yet Vulnerable Horseshoe Crab.
It’s not what I expected. But then again I have never read a feminist intraspecies ethnography before. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Moore shares my wonder at horseshoe crabs. They’re ancient, having existed on the planet since the Cambrian Age a half-billion years ago. They have blue blood, which has distinctive qualities for detecting endotoxin contamination and is used for testing the safety of all “human and animal parenteral drugs, biological products, and medical devices.” (109) They’re not really crabs and share more in common with scorpions and spiders.
Most intriguingly, they have a mating process that becomes a spectacle. For years I have, (erroneously), believed that at high tide on the full moon closest to the summer solstice, horseshoe crabs will gather in the surf of certain beaches in the mid-Atlantic and, by the light of the moon, will begin to march ashore. A female, the larger of the genders, will usually have a male crab amplexed to her ophisthosoma (yes, that’s what the kids ARE calling it these days) as she emerges from the water and will be accompanied by several other satellite males. She will will lay hundreds of thousands of eggs in the sand which are then fertilized by the males. Only about three larvae per 100,000 eggs will make it to juvenile status. (77) Shorebirds, who adjust their migratory patterns to be present for the occasion, feast on the vulnerable crabs.
All of this is true except for the fact that the mating period is not limited to the one night near the summer solstice. The season stretches from the end of April through June. (79) The “one magic night” myth has appealed to the romantic in me, however, (much as Linus longed to see the Great Pumpkin on Halloween), and I have several stories of aborted kayaking trips on that night to Metompkin Island when fog and weather kept me from the beach.
Moore’s book is less romantic and less scientific than I had hoped for. She approaches her work through a laudable effort to see horseshoe crabs in their relationship with their environment and other species, especially humans. She talks about how our stories are intertwined, especially in the biomedical field as we have become dependent on bleeding horseshoe crabs for the safety of our injections. But there are also stories to tell about our shared lives in the face of overfishing and global warming. Moore also explores the language we use to talk about crabs that is overlaid with our own gender assumptions and anthropomorphizing tendencies. She talks about our “enmeshment with horseshoe crabs—material, discursive, psychological—and our becoming and being with them.” (93)
There’s a lot to think about when you look at crabs this way. I confess to being lost in all the theory at times reading Moore’s book. “Just get to the crabs,” I kept grumbling as Moore talked about her own experiences donating blood and her moral quandaries with her diesel car. But I’m no less prone to use the crabs as jumping off points for thinking about my life and the world.
They’re survivors, these crabs. They have their own primitive beauty. They respond to time and place in ways that are hard to fathom. Like those monarch butterflies who know, four generations after their ancestors left Mexico, how to get back home.
I’ll get out to see the spectacle some day. I’ve got the kayak ready. And I’ll take a picture to share. Natch.
Heartlands 