Catch and Release. Lisa Jean Moore
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their spiny and spiky exterior, they are also comical to human eyes. As described by the biologist Rebecca Anderson, the first time she worked with horseshoe crabs she “pretty much fell in love with them because they look like these fearsome creatures with armored bodies and all their legs, but they are ineffectual as defenders. And they look so adorable when they walk on land.” It is difficult for most humans to observe horseshoe crabs in the water, but they have been described as “rather graceful compared to their tank-like appearance when they come to the shore.”10 Omnivorous creatures, they eat mostly clams and worms. They do so by crushing and grinding their food with their legs—or, more accurately, their knees—and shoveling the food into their stomach.
Anatomical illustration of the horseshoe crab. Illustration by C. Ray Borck.
Globally, there are four species of horseshoe crabs living on the continental shelf—one in North America, Limulus polyphemus, and three in Southeast and East Asia. The three species of horseshoe crab in Asia are Tachypleus gigas, Tachypleus tridentatus, and Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda.
Some humans have been drawn to the horseshoe crab because it unlocks secrets about the “sea of life.” With a fossil record to verify its ancient lineage, the horseshoe crab is among the oldest old. According to geologist Blazej Blazejowski, when traced by looking at modification by descent, crabs haven’t changed morphologically over tens of millions of years and as such are stabilomorphs, organisms that are morphologically stable through time and space. Their closest relatives are trilobites, which lived from 510 millions years ago. Amazingly, the horseshoe crab has survived longer than 99% of all animals that have ever lived.11 One of the reasons the species have survived for so long is because of the composition of horseshoe crab blood cells called amoebocytes. The blood is copper based, and when it hits the air it turns blue. Because of the chemicals in the ameoboyctes, the horseshoe crab’s blue blood coagulates when it detects contamination. This instantaneous reaction to threat through clotting protects the animal from harm. It is this very quality of their blood, the ability to transform into a biopharmaceutical gel, that has been used to insure the safety of all injectables and insertables in human and veterinary applications.12
These ancient species are also remarkable because they are primarily aquatic, coming onto the shore for spawning and nesting for brief periods every year. Indeed, if we accept the anthropologist Stefan Helmreich’s definition—“the alien inhabits perceptions of the sea as a domain inaccessible to direct, unmediated human encounter”—then horseshoe crabs are aliens.13 Unlike many domesticated animals or pets, these aliens are not intimately knowable since their primary place of residence is uninhabitable by humans. Adding to their alien-ness, horseshoe crabs are not easy for the layperson to categorize. They live in the sea, but some suggest they look like spiders. They are sometimes attached—“amplexed”—to one another. (You find yourself asking, Is one of them a baby? Is it catching a ride? Are they fighting? Are they mating?) They are prehistoric, and yet they seem so vulnerable. On land, they are practically defenseless, writhing helplessly when upside down with their fragile bits exposed to hungry birds.
Contrary to their name, horseshoe crabs are not true crabs. They are not even crustaceans. Taxonomically they belong to the same broad category that crustaceans do, the phylum Arthropoda—meaning that as invertebrates they have no backbone or inner skeleton; they have jointed legs and a hard outer shell, an exoskeleton, which protects a soft body. Horseshoe crabs are chelicerates, belonging to the same group that includes ticks, spiders, and scorpions.
After spawning during high tides in March through July, the North American species buries its eggs, which develop within the beach sediments after a couple of weeks to reach the trilobite (first instar) larval stage.14 They become reproductive adults after 16–17 molts or 8–10 years—which is slow growing for a marine invertebrate. Molting is the process of shedding the old shell and emerging from it with a new body. At first this body is soft and small, but it will swell with water and increase in size as the shell hardens.
A female horseshoe crab returning to the water at high tide on Plumb Beach, Brooklyn. Photo by Lisa Jean Moore.
Significantly, humans have been able to breed crabs in captivity, but they cannot get them to live beyond their tenth molt—at that time the crabs die instead of surviving through the remaining 6–8 molts and becoming reproductive adults. Scientists do not understand why this might be so.15 Our inability to replicate “natural conditions” for horseshoe crabs means that their reproduction must be primarily studied in the wild. In my experience studying horseshoe crabs when they spawn, there is a great deal of physical contact between humans and crabs. Picking up crabs is relatively simple since they do not pinch, bite, or sting. And they are not too fragile to be handled. As the biologist Mark Botton, one of my key informants, describes them, “They are tough, and ancient, and in many ways indestructible. They are the perfect species to teach undergrads about field biology since they are so easy to catch.” Another of my informants, the esteemed horseshoe crab scientist Jane Brockmann, adds, “What I like about them is that they are predictable. Breeding on the new and full moon high tides makes it pretty predictable. So you can take a class out there and expect to find something.”
My Intellectual Path to Horseshoe Crabs
Sociology, as a discipline, is historically indebted to humanism. In the Western tradition, the human is viewed as the ultimate social/rational/political being: one that is able to perceive the world, think about it, and communicate about that world back to others. The doctrine of humanism affirms the existence of a thinking ego, a self, or an I—the fact that we all share the ability to conceptualize our own respective selves demonstrates a sort of harmonious connection among us, which in turn demonstrates our superiority over all other entities, living and nonliving. For centuries, scholars have explored the role of consciousness and reason as the foundation of our autonomy. We are the only beings who are capable of giving anything meaning or of exerting our influence within the world. Humanism is a vexing philosophy because it is both liberating—freeing us from supernatural explanations over which we have little control—and damning—bogging us down in endless debates about who gets to count as “human.” Sociology has made its business studying (un)harmonious connections, investigating the dynamics of social order, social problems, social organization, social control, conflict, and cooperation. But in the process, sociologists have overwhelmingly privileged humans in their analyses and interpretations.
As I was trained in the humanist traditions of sociology’s sub-field of symbolic interactionism, my original research studies took the human as the starting point of all methods of inquiry. I am a feminist medical sociologist who was educated in grounded theory in the early 1990s by Adele Clarke, and I have occupied this strange position of not really fitting in as a legitimate member of either the sociological or cultural studies worlds. “She’s not sociological enough,” I’ve overheard more than a few times—particularly because my work resists quantification toward overarching meta claims, rules, or laws about “society.” And at the same time, my use of methods is often suspicious to cultural studies folks who fear it is a form of nonreflexive data generation and Truth (with a capital T) claims. Since my methods act toward the world as if it exists, no matter how it is constructed, I start my projects with what I consider to be material realities. These are contested, politically, and heterogeneously represented realities, and yet they are still material realities. I have shown that honeybees die, clitorises disappear in genital anatomy textbooks, and sperm counts decline. Understanding how we co-produce the conditions of these material realities and then work to interpret them is, in part, my job.16
I came of age intellectually at the time of what some academics called the “Science Wars,” which were characterized by fervent debates about scientific truth claims and social constructionism—as well as the rise of queer theory and the influence of interdisciplinarity and, more specifically, cultural studies in social science. I learned how to become a qualitative sociologist through methodological training that rejected strict adherence to positivism or the creation of singular and universal social facts. At the same time, my empirical training