Catch and Release. Lisa Jean Moore

I’ve dug for their eggs, flipped them over, and followed them in the shallow surf, trying to keep pace with them as they glide out to sea. I love the feeling of holding active older crabs; as I slip my hands underneath their bodies, they grab onto me as if they are hugging my hands, and I feel that we are physically connecting. Their gripping is reassuring to me. And as I demonstrate in this book, I’m also implicated (as are you) in their capture, relocation, and bloodletting. I feel responsible to represent these nonhuman others, unlike other research subjects or informants, in ways that garner compassion, concern, and action from humans. At the same time, I must admit a certain quality of relief in that these subjects don’t talk back. Both literally and figuratively, I hold the crabs and their stories in my hands. They can’t talk back to me in a way that I can completely comprehend, but I must muster all my skills of observation and interpretation, as Carl Shuster suggests, to understand both the material and symbolic lives of horseshoe crabs as well as our becoming with them.

      2

      Endangered

      Anyone vaguely knowledgeable about horseshoe crabs immediately and dramatically proclaims that they are hundreds of millions of years old.1 Even the popular media fetishizes time with respect to horseshoe crabs. For example, people interviewed for the National Geographic Wild film Alien Crab claim that “dinosaurs saw the same species I am seeing” and “these ancient mariners crawled under the feet of Brontosaurus.” Truthfully, I have been told that horseshoe crabs have phylogenetic roots in the Cambrian Period and that fossils have been dated from the Upper Ordovician so many times that I have often feigned understanding the significance of this lineage and mustered what I thought to be the requisite astonishment. I have been shown charts to see what Cambrian means and how the geologic divisions of time—eons, epochs, eras, and periods—differ. During the Cambrian, horseshoe crabs—or more specifically, their distant relatives—were living among sponges and algae, some other marine invertebrates, and other arthropods, but there were no hominids. But once I walk away from these charts and my enthusiastic lecturers, I often quickly forget the ordering of this time, as if all were erased.

      Illustration of the geologic time scale. Illustration by C. Ray Borck, 2016.

      For me, understanding horseshoe crabs has meant getting a grip on my idiosyncratic, socially functional, and personally rewarding relationship with time. If we’re going to consider the horseshoe crab, as I have often been told, we’ll need to take a few steps back (and a deep breath) to understand the big picture and context of the crab’s existence; the implications of a species being labeled vulnerable, threatened, or endangered; and the process of being identified as a species. This chapter examines how, in addition to understanding horseshoe crabs in geologic time, we are forced to confront the destroyer-rescuer role that humans play. I am grappling here with geologic time and the contrasting time scales of the species—humans and horseshoe crabs. I argue that, in apprehending the horseshoe crab, humans experience enchantment, the magical interruption of route mindless repetition. At the same time I relate the crab directly to some very hard truths about our present ecological moment, including our being complicit in mass extinctions and horseshoe crab endangerment.

      * * *

      Since starting this project, I think of my life as before and after horseshoe crabs. Before horseshoe crabs, time was either immediately personal and measured in task-based increments or generational and measured in interactions with my parents, kids, or students. My everyday simplistic relationship with time was in the human, immediate, and egotistical sense, based on what I could personally experience. And it’s a good relationship from my perspective. My entire life I have been described as a fast person, a quick talker, an impressive multitasker, a speedy walker. I’ve always felt that time was similar to money: something to be thoughtfully spent, conserved for desired things, and managed to lead to optimal outcomes (e.g., doing laundry while making dinner as I entertained a toddler with pots and pans meant more time for reading a novel). Pride swells whenever someone says, “Whoa, you are such a good time manager,” or “I can’t believe how fast you are,” or “You get so much done.” And perhaps somewhat inhumanly, I’ve never truly empathized with the explanation “I didn’t have enough time.” In my more grandiose moments, I believe I can control time.

      I admit that historical thinking, for me, has been of the generational nostalgic variety. I am susceptible to glamorizing a past as less complicated, kinder, slower. I drift into visions of an unspoiled, pastoral, bucolic landscape of harmony.2 Yet this peaceable kingdom is always a past where humans existed and where I place my species-specific facsimile into a (not so) distant past. In the same vein, as part of my gender location and racial privilege, I can also lapse into idealizing decades or centuries ago as being so much safer and simpler.

      There is also the familial time of experiencing and then watching childhood. Reflecting on the gendered norms of my own childhood, I often tell my daughters how I was able to be a lanky, boyish girl playing soccer with a bad perm, scraped knees, and tube socks well into my sixteenth year. Yet my daughters, at younger than 16 when I started this project, are negotiating Snapchat, thongs, bikini waxes, and midriff shirts. I don’t think I could have handled the constant social media self-surveillance machine combined with hyperspecific tween/teenage body projects narrated in real time. Years ago, there seemed to be more places to hide and room for self-discovery without witnesses. Ironically, I don’t want my girls to grow up too fast or for time to pass us by.

      It is a personal paradox: In my everyday life I believe I have mastered time, but in geologic terms, I struggle. Geologic time is mind-blowing because of the limited capacities of human ontologies and epistemologies to apprehend it. Like many people, it’s hard for me to grasp concepts that have no solid measurements. Being properly socialized as human beings means we have to come to terms with how to communicate through measurement. These human inventions of measuring time have made it bend to our needs. Therefore understanding geologic time requires a completely different conceptual/affective apparatus.

      In the case of time, we assign measurements to seconds, minutes, and hours. I cling to these measurements as if they are real and as if we didn’t make this all up. I must be reminded that measurement of time is what humans concocted to explain phenomena such as aging or the rising and setting of the sun. Solid measurement of mass is materially more tangible because common sense dictates that an entity’s mass is never going to change and that, in its stability, it is secure. But time is always changing, and we can never talk about the present, since once we have, it is already the past. Even though human measurement of time is constructed, it becomes naturalized and then applied to all living things; we place all other things on our time scale. We assign time to biology-specific orientation to orders, routines, cycles, or life spans in all biological entities. I have found that humans are supremely interested in the life span of other species. When sharing the fact that worker honeybees live for about 6 weeks, I’ve often heard a sort of tragic astonishment from humans—“It’s so sad that their lives are so very short. They work themselves to death.” This anthropocentric empathy doesn’t consider time’s relevance to the bee or even how “6 weeks” is experienced by the species. Our time becomes all time.

      Deep time, alternately called geologic time, is defined as the time frame of the earth’s existence, the multimillion-year time frame. At first, I though that the failure to understand deep time was actually an idiosyncratic, personal failure. But I have come to understand that it’s not simply that I don’t get it, it’s that humans can’t access it in the same way that we can access the intensity of our regular lived time, the immediate time we can experience. But there are consequences of not understanding geologic time. For example, despite overwhelming evidence, in everyday life humans seem to be unable to fathom the enormity and catastrophe of global warming. The sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard expresses how we humans are unable to cognitively keep global warming at the front of our consciousness; we are collectively living in denial of climate change and manage our fear through emotional management strategies.3 Maybe my (and others) lack of apprehending geologic time is part of this emotional management—it is very hard to confront how my species has completely, irrevocably harmed the planet for all living things. Part of the larger