We happened to be just around the corner from the Liberty Bell when we got the call that the cat had died. She’d been failing for awhile but we’d planned this trip more than awhile ago and in the end she failed pretty quickly, and how are you supposed to plan for something like that? It’s all about timing, as they say, and it’s hard if not impossible to always get it right. What “right” even means in this circumstance is another question altogether.
In the beginning it was all about a return to Cape May, after a long hiatus, 20 or even 30 years. Cape May may have been our first “birding trip” ever, way back when, or at least the first one that took us on the road with a group of like-minded people, who also knew a whole lot more than we did about that stuff. It was with MA Audubon and it was whirlwind, just a weekend when we barely slept, wandering the beaches and forests of the southern New Jersey shore for hours. We were there in search of spring migrants passing along Delaware Bay, which are supposed to show up in abundance if the timing is right.
It is telling that memories of that trip include very few avian wonders but mostly just wandering in the predawn darkness, getting glimpses through the leaves of what in the end was mostly movement in the trees. There’s a single memory of a good look at a blue grosbeak and little else, with much more prominent memories of the trip leaders driving down the Jersey Turnpike and having sort of a competition of how fast one could drive through a toll booth and get all the quarters into the bucket. There were a lot of toll booths, and at the time none of us dared dream about a day when they’d all be gone. In those days we also didn’t think much about how any number of bird species might all be gone, as well, in our lifetimes, and did I say it was a long time ago?
In fact the most prominent memory of that trip was what we didn’t see, which was the featured (though not promised) annual spectacle of great mobs of shorebirds arriving from their wintering grounds far far to the south (Argentina! Chile! Tierra del Fuego, if you can believe that) just in time for the horseshoe crab spawning. We’re talking hundreds or even thousands of crabs, and eggs in the millions or tens of millions, and some ridiculous number of migrating birds, desperate for fat and protein after the long flight, much of it over water, ready for a gorge fest before moving on to the far north to breed.
It comes down to a matter of survival – of living and dying – and how the migration flyways of the world, all of them offering sustenance at the right time in the right places in the manner of Delaware Bay, are becoming an ever more precarious proposition. Human economic development and climate change have altered the equation that up until recently had worked out pretty well for thousands of years. Some of the life sustaining “food and rest stops” don’t offer the abundance they once did, or have disappeared entirely. For numerous reasons, h.sapiens loves building things near the water, and coastal waters are being degraded and shorebird numbers are diminishing and chances are you’ve heard something about this. And let us not get started on the role climate change plays in this picture, the scope and total effects of which nobody knows for sure at this point. The conservationists and fans of the natural world are pushing back, but it’s a heavy lift.
So we were especially fortunate this time around to get the timing just right and witness a “good year,” in an era where good years have become more and more significant. The crabs showed up and did their thing and the birds did theirs and it was kinda like old times, perhaps an outlier at this point but nobody’s claiming that, at least not yet. Imagine driving on a decrepit road across a vast marshland towards a beach, where long before you get there you can hear the screeching getting louder and louder, kind of like playground noise on steroids. Of course we knew what it was and the whole experience would’ve been much more dramatic and surprising if we hadn’t, one of those times when knowledge is overrated. But even knowing what to expect, finally reaching the shore presented us with a scene that was grand and dramatic and yes, somehow a bit surprising. The best spectacles can be like that; ask anyone who’s witnessed a total solar eclipse or visited the Grand Canyon.
Survival! The grandest reality show of them all, playing out right here on this beach and many others, both nearby and the world over, year after year, not at all like that TV “reality” show, the one with a slightly different name, where the stakes are utterly trivial in the end. Here, on the eastern shore of Delaware Bay, we were witnessing the efforts of entire species to keep it all going, and not so long ago it seemed it might go on forever. But no more. Nowadays it seems all these birds and crabs face the possibility of getting voted off the island for good, and who’d every believed that could happen? The story of bird migration, especially the part concerning the marathon fliers like the ones we were watching, is a tale well told in numerous books and films and is one with which most of our group was familiar, and you might be, too.
But when it comes to the story of the crabs, the other key player in this drama, maybe not so much. Pity the poor horseshoe crab! Not even a “true” crab but more accurately a chelicerate, lumped in there with spiders and ticks and scorpions, sort of an arachnid but not that, either, and aren’t those taxonomists a whole lotta fun? The confusion continues with the scorpion connection, where that long thin bony telson (not a tail!) sticking out the rear is not a stinger, at all, in the case of the crab, making it a lot less scary once one knows that. A scorpion the size of a horseshoe crab, especially one of the big females, would be a daunting creature, indeed, so isn’t it great that it just ain’t so?
Unless you’ve roamed the beaches of southeast Asia or along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, chances are you’ve never seen a horseshoe crab in person. Besides looking strange and other-worldly, the other striking feature is that they always seem to be dead, at least in this writer’s experience. A dead crab on the beach might be loosely compared to road kill, like all those squashed or at least lifeless squirrels and chipmunks familiar to anyone traveling slowly enough to notice them on a busy roadway. But the crab’s story is less obvious.
Getting left stranded when the tide goes out is the likely cause, but wouldn’t that leave the occasional still-alive survivor struggling to get back to the water, at least sometimes? What the beachcombing student of nature lacks is any familiarity with a live, animated creature. Encountering road kill can trigger memories of squirrels and chipmunks living out their lives, running along phone lines or climbing trees or skittering across the roadway, and aren’t they pretty darn cute! Horseshoe crabs are weird and ancient and really cool-looking, in their way, but cute they ain’t. The presence of dead ones on a beach is kind of sad, but what prevails is a sense of mystery.
Road kill they are not. In fact, most appear pretty much intact, in all sizes, both right-side up and inverted, though if one looks closer some shells contain viscera, while others are hollowed out, leading the occasional kid to to try one on as a helmet, only to get yelled at by Mom. Where are the live ones?
To give them credit, many fans of the natural world nowadays know the importance of horseshoe crabs in the grand natural scheme of things, as do the many organizations devoted to preserving that scheme, long under siege by human economic interests. A key aspect of this scheme is that every participant in the ecosystem matters as much as any other. It is also a fact that shorebirds get most of the attention in this picture, being the awesome long distance travelers that many are – we’re talking four and five thousand miles each way for many, and even a bit more for some – as well as offering gorgeous breeding plumages and cute baby chicks. Everybody loves birds! In this realm, the birds are sexy in a way that the crabs are not. Shorebirds have been featured on many a calendar through the years, horseshoe crabs not so much, and maybe it’s time this oversight got corrected and would you buy one?
Birds are special, for sure, but consider this: the horseshoe crab, for one thing, is the only living member left of the order Xiphosura, which goes back in the fossil record 440 million years (!) The last common ancestor of the four species of horseshoe crab existing in the current day lived about 135 million years ago, and little has changed since that time, making it one of those “living fossils” of which there are precious few in this world. The horseshoe crab is one of those ultimate examples of the adage “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”
Besides those distinctions, horseshoe crab blood has long been used in the development of vaccines worldwide to screen for toxins, with no synthetic chemical substitute developed until recently that can detect them as reliably. The upshot is that crabs have been crucial to the safety of vaccines since the 1970s, and the claim that millions of human lives have been saved as a consequence is not an exaggeration.
The “use” of crab blood by the pharmaceutical industry, whereby they don’t kill them outright but “bleed” them, has been shown to have negative consequences on mortality and population numbers . This, along with the use of crabs for bait, has led to severe declines of the population, especially for the Atlantic species found along the Jersey shore. Is it possible the species has finally met its match, after millions of years of survival? Is that tragic, or outrageous, or both? It is also painfully ironic, given that so many human lives have been saved in a process that could result in the crab getting wiped off the planet. Efforts are underway to address this, and horseshoe crab blood is no longer used by European companies, but those in the US have been slow to follow their lead. After all, what matters more: the bottom line, or preserving some homely-looking crab species?
Of course it’s one thing to learn fun & fascinating (& sometimes sad) facts, quite another to get up close & personal. Simply encountering a live crab would be a breakthrough in itself, but why stop there? Why not go ahead and pick it up, right there on the beach, and even better, save its life in the process. It doesn’t get more personal than that.
So that is exactly what we did, one warm evening as the tide was going out and a gibbous moon peeked through the clouds and a small crowd of birds and crabs lingered in the landscape. We were part of an organized effort sponsored by several wildlife groups that are out there on most nights during spawning season, when the frenzy of egg laying can leave untold numbers of crabs stuck on the beach. The program is cleverly named reTurn the Favor, which you can feel free to interpret in any way that makes sense to you.
Our evening began with a lecture on the wonders of Limulus polyphemus, and besides what has been mentioned would you also believe they have ten eyes, with the largest rods and cones of any animal, along with photoreceptors in the tail? And yet, with all that equipment they are considered to have poor eyesight? Or that they use that telson (not a stinger!) to lever themselves upright if they get flipped? We were warned that picking one up can lead to a lot of telson wagging, so watch out, and don’t set it down in the water with the telson tucked under, make sure it’s pointed straight out the back!
Thus thoroughly trained on how to do it, we joined a larger group out looking for some action. We showed up on a slow night, evidently, eventually returning 20 or so to the water, but the old hands told us some mights they deal with a hundred crabs or more. It all adds up: reTurn the Favor counts almost 120K “saves” thus far this year, and the grand total for the eleven years they’ve been at it is over a million.
It’s an oddly thrilling experience, picking up a big female, especially, and keeping it at arms length, the better to not get poked by the wildly waving telson, while all the tiny legs are in frantic motion – talk about animated! Then you need to flip it upright, so as to place it in the water while carefully setting the telson down first, pointed properly out the back, which was perhaps the trickiest part. After which it sort of crawls slowly or sometimes quickly but always majestically back into the ocean. Its life has just been “saved,” and does it know that? Do you care? Does the crab?
If only it had been so simple with our cat, Felice! The crab was a victim of sudden unexpected circumstances, had headed up that beach in no way expecting to be flipped and stranded and facing a premature end. Felice had just been slowly succumbing to the inevitable. The vet figured her age was about 15, a typical lifespan for a feline though we’ve all known cats that make it to 20 and beyond. She’d always been kind of underweight but energetic nonetheless. Her life had started on the street, back before we knew her, and she’d always eagerly venture out several times a day and even on cold snowy winter nights.
It was a few years back we’d realized she’d gone deaf (it can be a subtle condition with a cat, until you turn on the vacuum cleaner one day and she goes right on sleeping in the next room). Then came the thyroid condition that required daily medication, and after that concerns about her becoming really underweight, with a very erratic appetite. Then the excessive urination, and in the end kidney failure, which is a common way creatures of her species meet their end.
If you’ve lived with a cat getting old, some of this might be familiar. We’ve known any number of them. People who are not squeamish can choose to dose their cat with fluids, which can buy your pal a few more months and sometimes years. All you need is an IV bag of saline and a really big needle (20 gauge is common, which is big) that gets inserted under a flap of loose skin. It doesn’t take a vet or even a veterinary technician to pull it off, but doing it the first few times requires a certain kind of courage inspired by love plus a bit of false confidence, until it becomes routine.
If the cat is co-operative (and a surprising number are), the procedure can attain a ho-hum quality, kind of like brushing one’s teeth, and actually easier than trying to brush your cat’s. For whatever reason, Felice was randomly co-operative but most nights were far from ho-hum, with high drama more the norm. She’d growl or make other weird noises we’d never heard before. She struggled to escape. She’d get this wild look in her eye, like she was feeling totally betrayed by these people she’d trusted for so long, or such was my interpretation.
It had all begun with a true close call, something akin to the crab’s, back in mid-March. Intense verbal complaints and even more weight loss had led to a weekend in the ICU and a chilling “she might not make it” from at least one vet. But it was not yet her time, and starting on fluids at home led to a revival of sorts, both in her energy and our hopes. Had we bought her a few more weeks, or months, or even another year or more?
But as May and our trip approached, she was eating even less and looking kind of gaunt. She’d have moments of wobbliness, with a vacant look in her eyes. She stopped grooming. We dropped her off at the cat-boarding place the day before we left for Cape May, and had the necessary conversation about what they should do if she died while we were gone. It was a tough goodbye and in the end she almost held on until we got back, but not quite. They told us she’d seemed pretty content and enjoyed getting attention from staff right until the end, and that is the story we chose to believe.
If we’d been home to see her through it the outcome would’ve been the same, and as it turned out we were all spared a final panicky trip to the vet that would’ve surely happened, had we been in charge. As endings go, hers was pretty straightforward and hardly traumatic, and she was never alone, and maybe animals don’t care about that anyway.
Does a horseshoe crab stranded on a beach know it’s facing death? Does it feel relief when it’s unexpectedly picked up, and finds itself mysteriously back in the water, free to swim away and live another day? Does it feel grateful to its human benefactor? To the God of Horseshoe Crabs, by whom it has clearly been blessed? Are thoughts such as these just the work of a human imagination? Of course, and it’s probably a blessing that we are totally ignorant of imaginations other than our own, as tempting as it is to make things up.
Felice is gone but we’ve got lots of great memories. And for now, lots of horseshoe crabs have gone on living and the species endures and we got to play a small (very small) role in that effort and who knows? If we returned to that beach next year, would the individual crabs we saved come out of the water to thank us? How could we be sure it was them and not some other lookalike crabs messing with our minds?
