I walked along the estuary. A horseshoe crab the diameter of a basketball lay at surf’s edge. In spring the crabs, seemingly awakened from some lost Devonian deep, come up to the shallows of Delaware Bay to reproduce. The horseshoe crab does not look much like either a horseshoe or a crab, neither of which it is; its other common name, king crab, is also misleading. While the Alaskan king crab (truly a crab) is one of the culinary gifts of the sea, this Atlantic creature, this hoof of an arthropod, no longer even feeds chickens. But a generation ago, barefoot boys waded the bay and felt with
...more
