422. Horseshoe Crab Tracking

In June, 2003, I became a tracker of horseshoe crabs in Taunton Bay, where they are at the northern limit of their global range. Friends of Taunton Bay had a grant from the State Planning Office to do a one-year pilot project in bay management. The tracking effort was part of an assessment to provide background for that study.

I am a lifetime member of Friends of Taunton Bay, a nonprofit group keeping an eye on the bay through a variety of monitoring programs, starting in 1990. We partnered with Maine’s Department of Marine Resources in attaching sonar transmitters to thirteen crabs in each of two sub-embayments.

We were trying to figure out the horseshoe crabs’ annual patterns of movements, and whether or not they left the bay in the winter months for warmer waters in the Gulf of Maine, which it was generally believed they did.

 

Attaching Sonar Transmitter to Horseshoe Crab, June, 2003

My job was to track those twenty-six crabs with a sonar receiver carried about in a small boat. When the signal in my earphones from a particular crab was as loud as I could make it by fine-tuning my maneuvers, I marked my GPS (geographic positioning system) coordinates on a chart, figuring I was directly over that crab so my position was also its position as viewed from overhead.

Horseshoe crabs come ashore only during a two-week breeding season in the spring, so it’s no surprise that I saw only one during the two-and-a-half years I was tracking crabs from late April through late November. I judged that one to be directly under the boat when it was lodged against shoreline rocks; I backed off a few feet—and there it was with its mate, blue sonar transmitter epoxied to its prosoma (the forward part of its shell).

 

Gravel shore lined with mating horseshoe crabs.

As the tracking effort turned out, horseshoe crabs in Taunton Bay stay in the bay year-round, burying themselves in the mud for half the year during colder months. They rouse in late April, and immediately take off upslope from their over-wintering sites.

Not one of the crabs we were studying left its native embayment; there was no evident bridge between the two distinct populations that were separated by a distance of only about two miles. The channel bearing cold water into the bay from Frenchman Bay passes by a particular point of land that leaves no room for a warmer passage between the two shallower habitat sites.

 

Female horseshoe crab digs a nest for her eggs.

The movements of the crabs appeared almost random, but when females began giving off pheromones during the breeding weeks, males and females got together on their traditional breeding shores, males clasping females with a foremost pair of legs suited to that task, females navigating for both of them, making trials at digging suitable nest sites in sandy bottom soils, moving on if it didn’t work out, typically laying eggs in several sites in a row once it did.

 

Mating horseshoe crabs.

I will write more specifically about my engagement with the crabs in the following post.

407. Three Cheers for Sex

Sex is our ultimate activity. Without it, none of us would be here. Generation after generation, our ancestors have engaged in it, as our descendants will after us. Sex is a big deal. The biggest of all possible deals. The single most important of all human engagements. We are born of it and to it.

At the same time, we seldom talk about it. Why is that? Sex is in a class by itself that exists beyond words. Sex is more a matter of urges and emotions than it is an intellectual concept. It is certainly pre-verbal. Our progenitors had sex long before they had words. Words come after sex. Before sex, we talk about anything but, as if it never entered our minds.

We may not put it into so many words, but we think about it all the time and see it all around us. And lay plans with sex at the heart of the evening’s activities. All those candle-lit dinners, moonlight cruises, shared entertainments, shopping sprees, exotic vacations, new cars, engagement rings—what do they share in common if not an allusion to sex?

Each in our own way, we are all sexual beings, taking a particular place somewhere along the sexual spectrum of desire and fulfillment, appetite and release, as our parents took theirs, and their parents theirs. Even if childless couples, gays, and lesbians may not raise youngsters of their own, they contribute more than their share to communities that do, fairly meeting their generation’s obligation to its children.

Our sexuality is driven by the same life force that fuels our metabolism. Beyond that, it is a response to hormones that drive formation of the specific organs, body shapes, and urges we all exhibit in one way or another. Not that sex acts are consciously grounded on reproduction, which is often the last thing on partners’ minds when engaging in sexual behavior.

In fact, most of the time, we are trying our best to make sure that not one sperm reaches the egg it aims to hook-up with. Even without some form of birth control, the odds of a sperm’s being successful in meeting up with the egg of its dreams are inversely astronomical, that is, hugely minute.

A sexual engagement may be aimed at reproduction, but much more commonly that is not on the mind of either partner. Sexuality is more often aimed at gratification of passions, the sooner the better. The mind is thinking: soon, sooner, and now!.

If things work out to mutual satisfaction, particular pairs will want to stay together to make the passionate moments last not for seconds but for days, weeks, or a lifetime.

If they make a contractual agreement to do so, that’s what we call marriage, meaning our families and communities respect their intentions, and so back them up for the long term. At one remove, a community shares the joys of its members’ passions. Engaging on the deepest levels of physical intimacy, those members enable others to imagine and then perhaps realize their children and their grandchildren.

So do sexual engagements spiral through the decades like propellers driving ships ahead through vast oceans. Attraction and affection are one dimension of life, love and desire another, enduring passion and release a third. This is equally true for heterosexual couples, gay and lesbian couples, transsexual couples. The commitment to caring engagements is the essential ingredient that resolves the tension of being alone and unattached. Caring engagement, along with creativity and adventure, seems to be a good part of the meaning of life.

I remember watching young solo snowsledders race around turns that blocked their view of any machine that might be coming against them. With a lady riding tandem, that same turn was invariably negotiated slowly and cautiously. Which is it to be, devil-may-care, or we’re-in-this-for-the long haul? That depends on our age, and our committed engagements.

The art of life is in surviving reckless youth to reach the promised land of mature relationships.