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The Three Tomatoes
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Travel Tomato Style! Oh the places we'll go!
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Sex on the Beach:
Witnessing the Mating of Horseshoe Crabs in New Jersey
By Sarita Gupta
An article I read in 1996 fascinated me enough that I cut it out and filed it. It described an annual ritual, carried on for millennia. Each May thousands of horseshoe crabs come ashore to spawn. At the same time huge swarms of birds swoop down to the same shores as a midway point between their flight from South America to northern Canada to feast on the crab eggs. This frenzy of reproduction and feeding lasts approximately two weeks.
The fact that this takes place virtually in my backyard of the Delaware Bay is what made me determined to see it. It took 15 years for me to find a willing partner who thought this was worth a weekend trip. We were rewarded beyond measure.
Cape May, the southernmost point in New Jersey, is best known for its surf and fine Victorian homes. Very few know that on its Delaware Bay side, Reeds Beach is a prime location for the mating crabs. The owner of our charming B&B, in business for over 20 years, hadn’t heard of it. Neither had the Pennsylvania family at our breakfast table, three generations traveling together and coming to Cape May at least twice yearly. The woman at the Audubon Society’s bird observatory had a vague idea this was happening but at least pointed the way to Reeds Beach.
We timed our visit to Reeds Beach to coincide with high tide at dusk. It was deserted when we arrived yet the noise was deafening. Laughing gulls, (a more apt name would be cackling gulls) stretched in a narrow line as far as the eye could see, chowing down the crab eggs at the high tide line. A horde of red knots on the farthest point of the jetty waited patiently for their turn at the feasting table, engaging in the occasional balletic swoop to, I fancied, fend off boredom. Signs warned us to not disturb the birds as they use up critical energy every time they are forced to fly off.
We stayed our distance from the birds but the crabs were rolling in literally at our feet. The earliest horseshoe crab species were crawling around the Earth's shallow coastal seas for at least 100 million years before the dinosaurs. Whatever these oldest living fossils need to get in the mood and reproduce, apparently only the Delaware Bay has it. Each wave brought forth dozens of crabs. The roiling water would recede to show couples: the smaller male hooked onto the larger female. As she dug into the sand to deposit her eggs, the male rolled over to spawn them and the water did its part to cover them with sand.
The female crab lays up to 80,000 eggs each season. That sounds like an enormous number except that most end up in the gullet of a migratory bird. A fellow voyeur on the beach scooped up a handful of wet sand and showed us the green eggs nestled within. They are the size of a pinhead and the birds must eat enough of them—a hundred thousand or more per bird—to double their weight before doing the nonstop flight to the Canadian high Arctic. Why fly that far? Nature dictates that is the only place these birds can mate and hatch their young.
Watching this cycle in which all the players did their part ruled completely by instinct was mesmerizing. It begs the question of what is free will and how much of it do humans truly have. It also made me wonder if we could ever be as selfless as the female crab, laying her eggs over and over again to primarily benefit another species.
We stayed on the beach for practically two hours and returned early the next morning for more. Next year I want to be there for the mid-May full moon which I’m told drives even more crabs out of the water to mate on the beach—with even more birds feeding in their wake in order to get their own shot at reproducing 3,000 miles away. A New Yorker is hard pressed to get a better glimpse within driving distance of nature at work than that.
Sarita Gupta has a 25-year career with international non-profits, encompassing program development, fundraising, communications, marketing and management. She believes one works in order to be able to fund travel. The notches in her belt have to do with the number of countries she has visited, which is over 50 and counting.
