Catch and Release. Lisa Jean Moore

      Holding baby horseshoe crabs in the palm of my hand. Photo by Lisa Jean Moore.

      I have been handling horseshoe crabs since I was a child on the beaches of Long Island, New York. Running down the shore, telson—the tail—in hand, I terrorized my little brother. No compassion toward the crab as it bucked back and forth gesticulating its legs in a desperate attempt to defend itself. Separating amplexed—attached—crabs was also a favorite early summertime activity, and in my youthful stupidity and human hubris I asserted how I was helping the crabs to “stop fighting.” Through endless summer days, we’d have contests to see who could throw the crab further into the sea, our own version of playing horseshoes. Torture of animals is a sign of certain psychopathologies in children, and if it had been kittens we tossed into the sea by their tail, my parents would have certainly intervened—but the horseshoe crab raised not an eyebrow. My re-introduction to the crab, many years later, makes me shudder at my callous girlhood antics. When I began this research project in 2013, perhaps it was some sort of psychic penance for the sins of my former self.

      Beyond a sentimental attachment to crabs, much later in life I become aware of horseshoe crabs’ vast contributions to human life through their sacrifice for biomedicine, fishing, and evolutionary theories. As I have written this book, horseshoe crabs have transformed my awareness of the world. They are both materially wondrous as well as symbolically generous. Observing the crabs, their habits, movements, growth, I’ve come to appreciate the shoreline in a new way. Like honeybees, horseshoe crabs are designated an indicator species, a biological species that provides useful data to scientists monitoring the health of the environment. Through associations and extrapolations, scientists are able to track the migration, health, and fertility of other species and can infer the sustainability of habitats. Indicator species, also known as sentinel species, are useful for biomonitoring ecological health, and horseshoe crabs can serve as a proxy for the health of shorelines. If the horseshoe crabs leave, migrate, or die, that indicates that the environment is degraded. I, too, have come to see the horseshoe crab as signifying larger ecological and sociological trends—rising seas, biological interdependence, geologic time.

      My study centers on interviews with over 30 conservationists, field biologists, ecologists, and paleontologists and over 4 years of fieldwork (2012–2016) at urban beaches in the New York City area; natural preserves in Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan; and marine research sites in Cedar Key, Florida.1 In Catch and Release, I explore the interspecies relationships between humans and horseshoe crabs—our multiple sites of entanglement and enmeshment as we both come to matter. As I show, crabs and humans are meaningful to one another in particular ways. Humans have literally harvested the life out of horseshoe crabs for multiple purposes; we interpret them for understanding geologic time, we bleed them for biomedical applications, we collect them for agricultural fertilizer, we eat them as delicacies, we capture them as bait. Once cognizant of the consequences of harvesting, we rescue them for conservation, and we categorize them as endangered. In contrast, the crabs make humans matter by revealing our species vulnerability to endotoxins,2 a process that offers career opportunities and profiteering from crab bodies, and fertilizing the soil of agricultural harvest for human food. In these acts of harvesting, horseshoe crabs and humans can apprehend important ecological events: geological time shifts, global warming, and biomedical innovation. My work situates the crabs within my own intellectual grounding in sociology; however, this sociological perspective is not seamless, it is rife with debate.

      A major contribution of sociologists to contemporary thought is our production of theories and methods to determine, measure, and interpret social stratification and human inequity. Any introductory sociology course worth its weight provides students with critical thinking tools to examine race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and ability as social constructs that constrain our lived experiences. Armed with sociological insights to understand racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, and ableism, the student explores how personal feelings are entangled with structural location. As a sociologist, I’ve made my living analyzing, teaching, and investigating aspects of human inequity, but I’ve recently come to consider the ways we determine the relative status, rights, or power of nonhuman animals. For instance, how do we explain how our companion animals—any cohabiting dog, cat, fish, or hamster—rank more highly than those pesky pigeons, rats, or roaches? What are the mechanisms we use to justify the relative worth of animals “scientifically proven” to be “closer” to us—such as gorillas, chimps, and other primates—versus those deemed more strange and distant—such as crickets, rattlesnakes, or frogs? The domination of humans over all other beings has created an assumption that our species has more value and, thus, has the right to act upon other species in our own interest. Speciesism, the belief in the inherent superiority of one species over others, was coined by the British psychologist Richard Ryder in Victims of Science: The Use of Animals in Research and popularized by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer.3

      Speciesism is not just a ranking system of humans over all animals. Rather, humans create an even more specialized way of determining the worthiness of an animal—worthy of our care, our protection, our attention, and our love. How much we care seems to be very closely associated with how we regulate our scientific research and handling of animals. During an all-day visit to several shoreline field sites in Connecticut, the conservation ecologist Jennifer Mattei and I engaged in a philosophical discussion about the relative compassion for shorebirds compared to horseshoe crabs. I asked why so many seem to rank birds above the horseshoe crab. “It’s because it doesn’t have a backbone,” she instantly replied. I laughed, thinking she was joking and that the answer had to be more complicated than that. Although she was driving, she turned to make eye contact, and said, “I could crush a horseshoe crab, and no one would care, but if I did it to a bird, I would be arrested. Any research with animals with a backbone has all these protections. It’s total human bias that things more like us [require] more protection than things not like us.” I nodded, coming to terms with the fact that maybe it was as simple as that. She continued, “Who cares about a spider when they don’t have as many neurons as us and can’t feel what we feel? It’s the whole vertebrate-invertebrate divide.”4 Jennifer is right in the fact that the lack of a spine has had serious implications for the social status of the horseshoe crab and other invertebrates. Insisting that a backbone is required to feel pain creates a definitional absolute that leaves horseshoe crabs and other animals in an impossible position. Their responses to injurious stimuli are interpreted as something other than affect—a reflex—and as such, compassionate care does not need to be rendered. Despite mounting evidence,5 this popular and intransigent belief among many humans that animals without backbones do not feel pain influences our dismissive treatment of 95% of the total number of species on earth.6 But returning to horseshoe crabs specifically, what are the other distinguishing characteristics of this species?

      Horseshoe Crab Biology and Anatomy

      The ocean-dwelling horseshoe crab of North America, Limulus polyphemus, is a strange-looking animal. It crawls along the ocean floor with its maroon helmet-like hard-shelled top, the carapace, made of chitin and proteins. It has 10 “eyes” and six pairs of legs and claws underneath. In addition to its two compound lateral eyes, its other eyes are light-sensing organs located on different parts of its body—the top of the shell, the tail, and near the mouth. These eyes assist the crab in adjusting to visible and ultraviolet light and enhance adaptation to darkness in various environments, aquatic and terrestrial.7 A crab uses a nonpoisonous 4–5 inch hard tail, called a telson, to steer or right itself when it is overturned.8 The telson is dragged in the sand as the horseshoe crab lumbers along the shoreline. Adult crabs weigh 3–5 pounds and are 18–19 inches in length from head to tail for females (males are a few inches shorter). They can live for about 20 years. During spawning, they are either on the beach around high tide or swimming in 2–3 feet of water. When not spawning, they crawl along the bottom of the ocean at depths of 20–400 feet.9 On the shore, they are “slow and easy to catch” making them