Catch and Release. Lisa Jean Moore
Time is one of those things. I am trying to understand how people care about time or become invested in deep time as a concept that enhances the value of horseshoe crabs.
As a species, we humans, it seems, are deeply wrapped up in our own embodied, affective relationship to time because we feel it. It’s what we use to measure our own lives, our worth. We can’t feel geologic time in the same way as we can immediate or experiential time. Being with the crabs helps me (and probably others) to approach and experience an affective resonance with deep time; perhaps this is why I (and others) have come to think they’re magical. They blow our minds because they transcend our capacities for apprehending time. They push us to think of time differently. It’s not that simply that I don’t “understand” deep time—we all are challenged and make up myths, stories, sciences, and religions to address the idea of what’s come before us and what remains after us. Deep time and immediate time are both measurements that I’ve learned, and as such both are constructions. For me the difference is not really cognitive but affective. I can connect my body to immediate time through my hunger levels, my sleepiness, my wrinkles, my kids’ artwork. But I have a harder time connecting my affective self to the Cambrian.
Horseshoe crabs somehow make decisions as individuals and as a species in both immediate and geologic time. Individually, crabs practice going to the shoreline, burrowing in the sand, laying eggs and eating. But over vast millions of years horseshoe crabs as species have also done these things on the changing terrain of earth. Their orientations are perhaps toward changes in light, seasons, water temperatures, tides, and geography. Do they remember through temporality or location? Are our almost theological beliefs in the separation of space and time even relevant to them? Are they nostalgic for another eon long ago when their companion species were different, when they didn’t have to share the planet with grabby humans? It is these very questions that function like an ethnographer’s fumbling “imponderabilia” of a crab’s everyday life.4 The founder of social anthropology Bronislaw Malinowski urges ethnographers to plunge into “natives’ games” as a means of getting at the “culture” of other humans—the task is even more tricky when plunging with the crabs.
I am unable to speculate about the crabs’ relationship to experiential time. When time is measured in meta or deep terms, it is challenging for me to grasp, and I am re-assured by the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, who says that “deep time is so difficult to comprehend, so outside our ordinary experience, that it remains a major stumbling block to our understanding.” He continues, “Deep time is so alien that we can really only comprehend it as a metaphor.”5 In geologic time, the extent of human’s history is like a blade of grass on the far end line of a soccer field, and horseshoe crabs would be at about the top of the goal box.
Deep time is based on geologic theories extrapolated from evidence found in strata, rocks, or fossils. On this geologic time scale, I rarely admit that I don’t really know if humans lived in Pangea (we didn’t), or, more embarrassing still, I am not precisely sure when the Neolithic Period was (also known as the New Stone Age, it occurred around 10,000 BCE). We have existed for but the slightest fraction of time of the Earth’s 4.6 billion years. In the case of deep time, part of why we want to know about the deep past is because it helps us to infer about the future. We want to understand the dinosaurs and their extinction because we want to infer things about ourselves. We interpret the geologic matter of dinosaurs to be a big clue for our essential questions: How did we get here, and how might we endure? Horseshoe crabs precede dinosaurs by 200 million years, and as such they might harbor many clues. The paleontologist Richard Fortey wonders what has led them to be “ancient survivors.” He asks, “Is being a survivor a question of having some very special features or nothing more than pure chance?”6 Indeed, what, if anything, do horseshoe crabs tell us about the past and our future?
For the remainder of this chapter, I toggle back and forth between the descriptions of my fieldwork—the being in it with scientists—and my interpretation of how these scientific projects work to construct things. This toggling is between the actual work of making horseshoe crabs known through time, speciation, and counting and then the meta-analysis of what this knowing reifies about the singular and absolute concepts of Time, Species, and Census. In what follows, I am both engaged in the fieldwork and then telescoping out to interpret what the fieldwork, the science, constructs as foundational.
The Magic of “Geologic Time, Baby”
Walking though the halls of dioramas in New York City’s Museum of Natural History, my youngest daughter pulls on my hand and whines, “When do we get to see the people?” She’s bored with seeing taxidermied animals and wants to go to the exhibits of human scenes and especially the miniature renderings of human civilizations. Once we arrive she runs to her favorite “families” and makes up fantastic stories about what the people are doing, paying close attention to the babies and children.
Perhaps it is a sign of our ultimate anthropocentricism that there is something so difficult for us to conceive about time before humans. I suppose I am species-solipsistic when it comes to time—my species wasn’t there, and so I somehow struggle with the time before humans existed. Yet I see how dangerously close this cleaves to creationism. Indeed, while studying horseshoe crabs, I came across photographs of a gigantic insulated foam and fiberglass model of a horseshoe crab temporarily owned by the Freedom Worship Baptist Church in Blanchester, Ohio. Erected in 2006, “Crabby”, the 28-foot wide, 68-foot long model was originally part of a nautical museum. The church subsequently sold the structure when it declared bankruptcy, and it was re-assembled as a roadside attraction. When interviewed about the relevance of the horseshoe crab to his church, Pastor Jim Rankin stated, “The fossils found of the horseshoe crab are the same as they appear in the waters today. The crab never evolved, so the creation account must be true.”7 The ancient existence of horseshoe crabs and their stasis, or morphological stability over time, are both used as evidence among creationists to testify to Genesis and to intelligent design over evolution.
The World’s Largest Horseshoe Crab in Blanchester, Ohio
I am not a denier, though. Technologically sophisticated media shifts my consciousness and invades our senses. Hollywood pushes this along with the massively produced Jurassic-ish worlds that have further corrupted my ability to truly believe anything. I find myself uttering, “That’s so fake,” as if the scientifically grounded yet theoretical descriptions of the past are some CGI-generated cinematic entertainment. Paradoxically these mediations, fantastic and scientific, produce increased skepticism about geologic time, making it imponderable for us. And why must we care about deep time and how long horseshoe crabs have lived?
My friend Pat gave me some insight. When she was teaching her daughter Ryan about geologic time, it both awed and reassured her. There is some odd existential comfort in the interpretation of deep time being profound and the revelation of our human existence as insignificant, repetitive, or mundane.8 Our lives and the collection of ordinary worries are dwarfed by deep time; we might feel some liberation in understanding that our existence really is inconsequential. Pat recalled:
I know this sounds simple, but we did one of those to-scale paper time lines. When you draw it all out, including both major extinction events, the scale of it is truly mind-blowing. And then how it has all been pieced together recently. The pure randomness and variety of what existed, and what persisted. Against all of it the unassuming horseshoe crab is a miracle that swam across a whole chunk of that time line. And yet, given the whole time line, they (and we) are a blink. And that means our blizzard is meaningless. This is what makes me happy. Not academic enough for any article or book, but the wonder of it exploded for me when I broke it down to teach a fifth grader. And I’ve been hooked on it ever since. “Geologic time, baby,” is the shorthand phrase Liz and I use all of the time in our household. The emotional equivalent for me of that “Let It Go” dopey Disney song.