Watch video...
This is a sexy time of year for Martin P. Schreibman, a marine biologist who lives in the Rockaways and works at Brooklyn College.
“It’s prehistoric romance, all over the beaches — I love it,” he said while strolling the shoreline recently at Plum Beach, just off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. There, by the lapping waters of Jamaica Bay, were hundreds of horseshoe crabs, crawling up onto the sand.
“They’re all here for one reason: to make baby horseshoe crabs,” said Dr. Schreibman, as he picked up stray horseshoe crabs that had become stranded up on the beach and tossed them back into the water. “Throw back a stranded horseshoe crab, you’ll be saving the crab and helping future generations.”
Dr. Schreibman founded the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center at Brooklyn College, where he has been raising horseshoe crabs from eggs for many years.
There are always setbacks for an urban marine biologist. He pulled several mating horseshoe crabs out of the discarded plastic garbage bags in which they had become entangled. Recently, he lost a number of his young lab-raised crabs to a raccoon that had broken into the labs and went fishing in the growth tanks.
But Dr. Schreibman has a special optimism for these unsung creatures. This is a man who wooed his wife by taking her — along with a beach blanket and a bottle of wine — down to certain beaches where the crabs gather, because he finds it romantic.
“How could you not find this sexy?” he said, pointing out five male horseshoe crabs attached to a female. The males were seeking to fertilize the eggs that the female digs into the sand after crawling up onto shore.
O.K., so maybe not everyone can see the intense eroticism in aquaculture the way Dr. Schreibman does, especially given that it is hard to imagine one of these prehistoric creatures in a bikini or a Speedo, or cruising the singles bars. Nevertheless, his enthusiasm is more a byproduct of his desire to help protect the crabs, which for the past month have been crowding the shorelines of Jamaica Bay. The federal government agrees, and recently put a moratorium on harvesting them in Jamaica Bay, to preserve the populations.
“They’re wildlife,” said Brian Feeney, a National Parks Service spokesman at the Gateway National Recreation Area, which oversees Jamaica Bay. “It’s like shooting an elk or a raccoon.”
Mr. Feeney said that violators can be arrested or given a summons, depending on how many crabs they have taken.
George Frame, with the Gateway National Park, said the moratorium was put into place in recent months partly to protect their nesting sites and to preserve the populations of horseshoe crabs, whose eggs are a vital food source for certain migrating birds.
“We’ve given them full protection to keep them from declining,” he
Also threatening the horseshoe crab is the loss every year of an average of 45 acres of salt marsh in Jamaica Bay, which has an approximate total of 900 acres of such marshland left, he said. Environmentalists are trying to restore areas of marshland in the bay, which would provide a crucial habitat for the crabs, Mr. Frame said.
“I counted 1,400 crabs at a recent high tide on one island in Jamaica Bay,” he said. “I once counted 1,800 on a stretch of shoreline in Broad Channel.
The ban frustrates fishermen who rely on the horseshoe crabs to bait their conch and eel traps. Some of them complain that such bans only encourage lawbreaking fishermen to catch the crabs at night and sell them in huge quantities on the black market to medical researchers for their blood, which is used to test for pathogens.
