before dinosaurs
and flying insects
horseshoe crabs
drawn from the deep
at summer's high tides
Late afternoon in early July. The air is thick with heat as I join several others for the crab walk at Kimble's Beach on Delaware Bay. Sand crunching under sneakers, we gravitate toward the shoreline and our guide, in khaki shirt and shorts, wiry gray beard.
Beyond him, near the curl of crystal water, birds peck with long beaks for horseshoe crab eggs and sand flies. Large white birds behind us dot bleached snags and skim the jade-green salt marsh. Someone asks what they are.
“Birds!” our guide says without a glance. “I'm Ralph, by the way. Probably the only naturalist at the Jersey Shore who doesn't give a hoot about birds.”
He scans for horseshoe crabs in the purling water that licks the beach. These armored arthropods are why I'm here. As their May-June mating season winds down, I've come to help turn over crabs. And to try to imagine their peak spawning, on evening high tides under full and new moons . . .
ancient mariners
charting by light and dark
thousands
throng this beach
biological clocks ticking
First to surface, clusters of males wait, humps in the shallows. Egg-laden, each arriving female heads for the beach, releasing pheromones, the Limuli love potion. Males jostle to hook to the back of her shell. At water's edge, she digs, lays thousands of pearl-like eggs, and pulls her mates across to deposit their milt. They move on, do it again. And again, leaving each clutch to incubate in warm beach sand.
During the season, volunteers walk the beaches to flip any crabs left on their backs by the tide. “They won't hurt you,” Ralph tells us. “Pick them up by the sides of the shell – not the tail. If it breaks off, next time he washes ashore, he'll be a dead crab. He needs that tail to turn back over.”
The naturalist extends a lifeless male horseshoe crab and points out ten walking legs under its shell. Its first pair has pincers for grasping the female's shell. Not a true crab, he adds, it's more closely related to spiders and scorpions. A direct descendant of now-extinct trilobites.
Merostomata
legs attached to the mouth
mysterious
under your armor
in a class all your own
We walk, swatting at greenhead flies. An hour passes as I look in vain for a live crab to rescue. And listen to Ralph. To know when to mate, he says, some of the crab's nine eyes detect changes in moonlight. Even its spear of a tail has light sensors.
As we retrace our steps, someone spies dark shapes in the amber water. At last.
We watch in a hush. Markedly larger, a female digs into the sand with two males hanging on. A third, trying to attach, slips into the waves.
birds, turtles, fish
consume her roe
a few hatchlings
will live to follow
the moon
As a writer, Susan Weaver follows where curiosity leads her. Before retirement, she was a bicycling, fitness, and travel journalist and magazine editor. A dozen years ago she discovered the Japanese poetry forms tanka and tanka prose. In 2018 she became tanka prose editor for Ribbons, journal of The Tanka Society of America, and this year, its editor. Her recent work has appeared there and in Atlas Poetica, Golden Walkman, HARTS & Minds, Moonbathing, red lights, Zingara Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Weaver lives in Allentown, Pa., with her husband, an artist and writer, and their two cats.
Featured image by Susan Weaver
