Horseshoe crabs have been visiting Thomas Bay to mate and lay their eggs on the sloping sandy beach for the past 300 million years. If you know your history, that’s about 100 million years before the dinosaurs.
According to Pati Crooker Mulligan, the owner and manager of Thomas Point Beach, the horseshoe crabs arrived earlier this spring than in years past. She said during May’s full moon, there were “eight to 10 crabs deep on the beach at high tide.” She believes the warmer temperatures this spring played a roll in the early en masse arrival.
It seems human visitors have also been arriving in larger numbers in the past five years. According to Crooker Mulligan, word is spreading about this annual event in Thomas Bay.
The horseshoe crabs typically arrive looking for some action ... errr, mates ... with the full moon’s high tide in May. Then they usually hang around the beach until mid-June.
Our large group - 10 kids ranging in age from 4 to 14 years old – visited the beach about a week after the full moon. The foggy conditions kept the temperature hovering around 60 degrees, which wasn’t exactly ideal beach weather, but it didn’t seem to bother the crabs, or the kids.
We saw several pairs of mating crabs as well as some individuals crawling and swimming just below the surface of the water at the shore. One of the older kids made a comment about the occasional single male crabs we spotted (males are smaller than females so gender is easy to identify) and wondered aloud when these single guys would find a “girlfriend.”
There were also the inevitable questions about why the male crabs were laying on top of the larger females. Yeah, well this migration was about reproduction and being the brilliant mother that I am (note much sarcasm here), I had not really anticipated how I might respond to these questions.
Of course answering was trickier than usual because there were several kids who were not my own. Thinking on the fly, I stuck with some old advice to keep things simple and answer only the question asked by the child. My explanation of “mating to have babies so they can come back next year“ satisfied the group. No follow up questions were asked before the kids moved on to the next activity on their agenda, building a big sand castle.
(I will always be grateful for small favors – and sand castles.)
It might seem like this trip should have been all about the horseshoe crabs; that we should have spent hours admiring the creatures and talking about their history and their contributions to our world today. Yet that wasn’t realistic with our large group of active kids. The moms in our group had done some research about these creatures ahead of time and shared interesting tidbits we’d learned with the kids at various points during the afternoon:
* Did you know horseshoe crabs have blue blood?
* Did you know that these crabs’ special blood that can protect us against certain kinds of poisons? The medical profession uses their blood to detect bacterial toxins on medical instruments, intravenous drugs and vaccines, which helps prevent us from getting sick.
* Did you know the female carries the male onto the beach then buries herself and lays 20,000 to 60,000 eggs? These eggs provide food for many birds but there are always enough baby crabs that survive for a future visit to the beach.
* Did you know all the crabs we see on this beach are adults and at least 9 years old? They have a life span of 16 to 40 years.
There were plenty of other things to see and do at the beach and campground and we took full advantage to simply enjoy our day outdoors. The big metal seesaws and roundup at the nearby playground were durable enough for larger kids and kept the teens there longer than the prerequisite, “keep an eye on your little sister (or brother)” would normally require. And then there was the bonfire at the campsite. Although my family had not planned to stay overnight, our friends did and their campsite was well stocked with snacks. The s’mores and the campfire popcorn popper that worked like a charm over the fire were special treats for everyone.
Allowing kids to explore the natural world while having a whole lot of fun is what makes living in Maine such a great place to raise a family. But the next time I decide to take the kids to a migration event, I’ll be better prepared to explain about the lovebirds.
Originally published in Raising Maine Magazine, July 2010.
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