Seven Years of Good Luck
“If you kiss a horseshoe crab, you get seven years of good luck,” my buddy gently offered, lifting the prehistoric-looking creature my way. Gross, but yeah, sure, there’s plenty of space in between the eyes for a peck.
“No, on the mouth,” she said as she turned the crab over to reveal the underbelly. It was a glimpse into the dark underworld, childhood nightmares, and the bottom of a rusted-out car.
Gulp. Under the hood of a horseshoe crab, there is A LOT going on, and what I took away from that night is that we (scientists and beachgoers alike) still have so much to learn.
Heather, who is deeply engaged in environmental initiatives with local groups like Rockaway Waterfront Alliance and Arts in Parts, invited me to tag along on this nighttime adventure. We biked over the Cross Bay Veterans Memorial Bridge to meet the horseshoe crab research team.
To my surprise, it was a friendly group of female volunteers, from all over NYC, with varying degrees of experience. We were all, at least for the night, citizen scientists and protectors of our shared waterways. As the sun sunk deeper, we donned our headlamps and headed toward the water, tasked with counting and tagging horseshoe crabs on Big Egg Marsh Beach. It’s up to us volunteers to gather the data necessary to help protect them.
We plodded along the narrow beach — an obstacle course in rain boots — stepping over trash, dodging fishermen, dipping under their lines.
We used plastic transects to count the number of horseshoe crabs hovering in the shallow water. Horseshoe crabs gravitate toward the high tide zone during the full moon and new moon in May and July to lay and fertilize eggs. From above, their mating process, finely tuned over 400 million years, looks like hundreds of Roombas bumping heads as they try to clean up a sandy floor.
As clunky as they look, they are immensely important to us and their ecosystem. We commonly use their bacteria-detecting blue blood to keep medical procedures and equipment sterile (one gallon can be worth $60,000!). Habitat loss, pollution, and over-harvesting by humans (for bait and blood) are leading to major population declines, which could affect the fish and shorebird populations that feed on their eggs.
After counting, we rolled up our sleeves and started tagging. We punched little plastic disks onto the exterior of their shells to help track where the crabs go. Little is known about what they get up to under the surface. So, if you see a tagged crab on the beach, you can help by going to the website on the tag and sharing its number and location.
The whole experience was refreshing — being in the water, doing a hands-on project with like-minded women, watching the sun set over the city, pulling trash out of the bay by the armloads. But, most importantly, seeing first-hand that there is life in our waterways and there are people who care about keeping it there. I biked back home, wet socks and all, feeling lucky.
Originally shared by The Wave on June 8, 2017