Horseshoe Crabs - God's Perfect Creation
Horseshoe crabs are benthic (living on the bottom) animals who inhabit shallow offshore habitats and brackish estuaries. They were swimming and crawling on planet earth long before the dinosaurs roamed the land. There are four species of horseshoe crabs. Those in North American can only be found on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts from Maine to the Yucatan Peninsula. The other 3 species live in Southeast Asia. Actually, horseshoe crabs are not crabs (or crabby) at all. They are arthropods, more closely related to spiders, scorpions and ticks.
They are not at all fast or graceful as a dauphin; not even a tiny bit as ferocious as a shark; and not colorful like so much of the marine life that inhabits in the same waters. Apart from their scary looking tales (only used for navigation and to flip them back up when tipped over) they might be mistaken for a brownish rock washed smooth by the tide. One might therefore assume they’d have very low self-esteem and need years of counselling. That would be a misjudgment. Scientists have found fossils that date back 450 million years and, astonishingly, when compared to today’s horseshoe crabs, there has been minimal alteration. Apparently, evolution saw little need to make any significant changes. There must be some lesson in all this.
A good friend recently told me that she has been enamored with horseshoe crabs since a very early age. Given that she is a very kind and expansive minded person who sees much deeper than most of us, I thought that I must find out why. Was it their evolutionary triumph; their blue blood used by pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers to test their products for the presence of endotoxins; or, could it be that they are so understated and unassuming, going about their lives (25 year life span) with little fanfare? She hasn’t yet told me, but I suspect it wouldn’t need so many words as all this.
As a 10 – 12 year old boy living just blocks from Narragansett Bay in a coastal New England town, I remember picking up a horseshoe crab on the shore as it waited for the tide to take it back out. At that moment, and without really knowing anything about them, a wave of awe and admiration came over me. I could feel it. But, as boys at this age will do, I quickly put it down, not as respectfully as I should have, and got back to seeing how many jumps I could skim a stone over the water.
If I could go back there now, I would know to reference that horseshoe crab and that moment as my friend has done almost all her life. The sacred is all around us.