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Endangered

Anyone vaguely knowledgeable about horseshoe crabs immediately and dramatically proclaims that they are hundreds of millions of years old.1 Even the popular media fetishizes time with respect to horseshoe crabs. For example, people interviewed for the National Geographic Wild film Alien Crab claim that “dinosaurs saw the same species I am seeing” and “these ancient mariners crawled under the feet of Brontosaurus.” Truthfully, I have been told that horseshoe crabs have phylogenetic roots in the Cambrian Period and that fossils have been dated from the Upper Ordovician so many times that I have often feigned understanding the significance of this lineage and mustered what I thought to be the requisite astonishment. I have been shown charts to see what Cambrian means and how the geologic divisions of time—eons, epochs, eras, and periods—differ. During the Cambrian, horseshoe crabs—or more specifically, their distant relatives—were living among sponges and algae, some other marine invertebrates, and other arthropods, but there were no hominids. But once I walk away from these charts and my enthusiastic lecturers, I often quickly forget the ordering of this time, as if all were erased.

Illustration of the geologic time scale. Illustration by C. Ray Borck, 2016.

For me, understanding horseshoe crabs has meant getting a grip on my idiosyncratic, socially functional, and personally rewarding relationship with time. If we’re going to consider the horseshoe crab, as I have often been told, we’ll need to take a few steps back (and a deep breath) to understand the big picture and context of the crab’s existence; the implications of a species being labeled vulnerable, threatened, or endangered; and the process of being identified as a species. This chapter examines how, in addition to understanding horseshoe crabs in geologic time, we are forced to confront the destroyer-rescuer role that humans play. I am grappling here with geologic time and the contrasting time scales of the species—humans and horseshoe crabs. I argue that, in apprehending the horseshoe crab, humans experience enchantment, the magical interruption of route mindless repetition. At the same time I relate the crab directly to some very hard truths about our present ecological moment, including our being complicit in mass extinctions and horseshoe crab endangerment.

* * *

Since starting this project, I think of my life as before and after horseshoe crabs. Before horseshoe crabs, time was either immediately personal and measured in task-based increments or generational and measured in interactions with my parents, kids, or students. My everyday simplistic relationship with time was in the human, immediate, and egotistical sense, based on what I could personally experience. And it’s a good relationship from my perspective. My entire life I have been described as a fast person, a quick talker, an impressive multitasker, a speedy walker. I’ve always felt that time was similar to money: something to be thoughtfully spent, conserved for desired things, and managed to lead to optimal outcomes (e.g., doing laundry while making dinner as I entertained a toddler with pots and pans meant more time for reading a novel). Pride swells whenever someone says, “Whoa, you are such a good time manager,” or “I can’t believe how fast you are,” or “You get so much done.” And perhaps somewhat inhumanly, I’ve never truly empathized with the explanation “I didn’t have enough time.” In my more grandiose moments, I believe I can control time.

I admit that historical thinking, for me, has been of the generational nostalgic variety. I am susceptible to glamorizing a past as less complicated, kinder, slower. I drift into visions of an unspoiled, pastoral, bucolic landscape of harmony.2 Yet this peaceable kingdom is always a past where humans existed and where I place my species-specific facsimile into a (not so) distant past. In the same vein, as part of my gender location and racial privilege, I can also lapse into idealizing decades or centuries ago as being so much safer and simpler.

There is also the familial time of experiencing and then watching childhood. Reflecting on the gendered norms of my own childhood, I often tell my daughters how I was able to be a lanky, boyish girl playing soccer with a bad perm, scraped knees, and tube socks well into my sixteenth year. Yet my daughters, at younger than 16 when I started this project, are negotiating Snapchat, thongs, bikini waxes, and midriff shirts. I don’t think I could have handled the constant social media self-surveillance machine combined with hyperspecific tween/teenage body projects narrated in real time. Years ago, there seemed to be more places to hide and room for self-discovery without witnesses. Ironically, I don’t want my girls to grow up too fast or for time to pass us by.

It is a personal paradox: In my everyday life I believe I have mastered time, but in geologic terms, I struggle. Geologic time is mind-blowing because of the limited capacities of human ontologies and epistemologies to apprehend it. Like many people, it’s hard for me to grasp concepts that have no solid measurements. Being properly socialized as human beings means we have to come to terms with how to communicate through measurement. These human inventions of measuring time have made it bend to our needs. Therefore understanding geologic time requires a completely different conceptual/affective apparatus.

In the case of time, we assign measurements to seconds, minutes, and hours. I cling to these measurements as if they are real and as if we didn’t make this all up. I must be reminded that measurement of time is what humans concocted to explain phenomena such as aging or the rising and setting of the sun. Solid measurement of mass is materially more tangible because common sense dictates that an entity’s mass is never going to change and that, in its stability, it is secure. But time is always changing, and we can never talk about the present, since once we have, it is already the past. Even though human measurement of time is constructed, it becomes naturalized and then applied to all living things; we place all other things on our time scale. We assign time to biology-specific orientation to orders, routines, cycles, or life spans in all biological entities. I have found that humans are supremely interested in the life span of other species. When sharing the fact that worker honeybees live for about 6 weeks, I’ve often heard a sort of tragic astonishment from humans—“It’s so sad that their lives are so very short. They work themselves to death.” This anthropocentric empathy doesn’t consider time’s relevance to the bee or even how “6 weeks” is experienced by the species. Our time becomes all time.

Deep time, alternately called geologic time, is defined as the time frame of the earth’s existence, the multimillion-year time frame. At first, I though that the failure to understand deep time was actually an idiosyncratic, personal failure. But I have come to understand that it’s not simply that I don’t get it, it’s that humans can’t access it in the same way that we can access the intensity of our regular lived time, the immediate time we can experience. But there are consequences of not understanding geologic time. For example, despite overwhelming evidence, in everyday life humans seem to be unable to fathom the enormity and catastrophe of global warming. The sociologist Kari Marie Norgaard expresses how we humans are unable to cognitively keep global warming at the front of our consciousness; we are collectively living in denial of climate change and manage our fear through emotional management strategies.3 Maybe my (and others) lack of apprehending geologic time is part of this emotional management—it is very hard to confront how my species has completely, irrevocably harmed the planet for all living things. Part of the larger argument of this book is trying to come to terms with how humans come to care about things, ideas, objects, and animals. Time is one of those things. I am trying to understand how people care about time or become invested in deep time as a concept that enhances the value of horseshoe crabs.

As a species, we humans, it seems, are deeply wrapped up in our own embodied, affective relationship to time because we feel it. It’s what we use to measure our own lives, our worth. We can’t feel geologic time in the same way as we can immediate or experiential time. Being with the crabs helps me (and probably others) to approach and experience an affective resonance with deep time; perhaps this is why I (and others) have come to think they’re magical. They blow our minds because they transcend our capacities for apprehending time. They push us to think of time differently. It’s not that simply that I don’t “understand” deep time—we all are challenged and make up myths, stories, sciences, and religions to address the idea of what’s come before us and what remains after us. Deep time and immediate time are both measurements that I’ve learned, and as such both are constructions. For me the difference is not really cognitive but affective. I can connect my body to immediate time through my hunger levels, my sleepiness, my wrinkles, my kids’ artwork. But I have a harder time connecting my affective self to the Cambrian.

Horseshoe crabs somehow make decisions as individuals and as a species in both immediate and geologic time. Individually, crabs practice going to the shoreline, burrowing in the sand, laying eggs and eating. But over vast millions of years horseshoe crabs as species have also done these things on the changing terrain of earth. Their orientations are perhaps toward changes in light, seasons, water temperatures, tides, and geography. Do they remember through temporality or location? Are our almost theological beliefs in the separation of space and time even relevant to them? Are they nostalgic for another eon long ago when their companion species were different, when they didn’t have to share the planet with grabby humans? It is these very questions that function like an ethnographer’s fumbling “imponderabilia” of a crab’s everyday life.4 The founder of social anthropology Bronislaw Malinowski urges ethnographers to plunge into “natives’ games” as a means of getting at the “culture” of other humans—the task is even more tricky when plunging with the crabs.

I am unable to speculate about the crabs’ relationship to experiential time. When time is measured in meta or deep terms, it is challenging for me to grasp, and I am re-assured by the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould, who says that “deep time is so difficult to comprehend, so outside our ordinary experience, that it remains a major stumbling block to our understanding.” He continues, “Deep time is so alien that we can really only comprehend it as a metaphor.”5 In geologic time, the extent of human’s history is like a blade of grass on the far end line of a soccer field, and horseshoe crabs would be at about the top of the goal box.

Deep time is based on geologic theories extrapolated from evidence found in strata, rocks, or fossils. On this geologic time scale, I rarely admit that I don’t really know if humans lived in Pangea (we didn’t), or, more embarrassing still, I am not precisely sure when the Neolithic Period was (also known as the New Stone Age, it occurred around 10,000 BCE). We have existed for but the slightest fraction of time of the Earth’s 4.6 billion years. In the case of deep time, part of why we want to know about the deep past is because it helps us to infer about the future. We want to understand the dinosaurs and their extinction because we want to infer things about ourselves. We interpret the geologic matter of dinosaurs to be a big clue for our essential questions: How did we get here, and how might we endure? Horseshoe crabs precede dinosaurs by 200 million years, and as such they might harbor many clues. The paleontologist Richard Fortey wonders what has led them to be “ancient survivors.” He asks, “Is being a survivor a question of having some very special features or nothing more than pure chance?”6 Indeed, what, if anything, do horseshoe crabs tell us about the past and our future?

For the remainder of this chapter, I toggle back and forth between the descriptions of my fieldwork—the being in it with scientists—and my interpretation of how these scientific projects work to construct things. This toggling is between the actual work of making horseshoe crabs known through time, speciation, and counting and then the meta-analysis of what this knowing reifies about the singular and absolute concepts of Time, Species, and Census. In what follows, I am both engaged in the fieldwork and then telescoping out to interpret what the fieldwork, the science, constructs as foundational.

The Magic of “Geologic Time, Baby”

Walking though the halls of dioramas in New York City’s Museum of Natural History, my youngest daughter pulls on my hand and whines, “When do we get to see the people?” She’s bored with seeing taxidermied animals and wants to go to the exhibits of human scenes and especially the miniature renderings of human civilizations. Once we arrive she runs to her favorite “families” and makes up fantastic stories about what the people are doing, paying close attention to the babies and children.

Perhaps it is a sign of our ultimate anthropocentricism that there is something so difficult for us to conceive about time before humans. I suppose I am species-solipsistic when it comes to time—my species wasn’t there, and so I somehow struggle with the time before humans existed. Yet I see how dangerously close this cleaves to creationism. Indeed, while studying horseshoe crabs, I came across photographs of a gigantic insulated foam and fiberglass model of a horseshoe crab temporarily owned by the Freedom Worship Baptist Church in Blanchester, Ohio. Erected in 2006, “Crabby”, the 28-foot wide, 68-foot long model was originally part of a nautical museum. The church subsequently sold the structure when it declared bankruptcy, and it was re-assembled as a roadside attraction. When interviewed about the relevance of the horseshoe crab to his church, Pastor Jim Rankin stated, “The fossils found of the horseshoe crab are the same as they appear in the waters today. The crab never evolved, so the creation account must be true.”7 The ancient existence of horseshoe crabs and their stasis, or morphological stability over time, are both used as evidence among creationists to testify to Genesis and to intelligent design over evolution.

The World’s Largest Horseshoe Crab in Blanchester, Ohio

I am not a denier, though. Technologically sophisticated media shifts my consciousness and invades our senses. Hollywood pushes this along with the massively produced Jurassic-ish worlds that have further corrupted my ability to truly believe anything. I find myself uttering, “That’s so fake,” as if the scientifically grounded yet theoretical descriptions of the past are some CGI-generated cinematic entertainment. Paradoxically these mediations, fantastic and scientific, produce increased skepticism about geologic time, making it imponderable for us. And why must we care about deep time and how long horseshoe crabs have lived?

My friend Pat gave me some insight. When she was teaching her daughter Ryan about geologic time, it both awed and reassured her. There is some odd existential comfort in the interpretation of deep time being profound and the revelation of our human existence as insignificant, repetitive, or mundane.8 Our lives and the collection of ordinary worries are dwarfed by deep time; we might feel some liberation in understanding that our existence really is inconsequential. Pat recalled:

I know this sounds simple, but we did one of those to-scale paper time lines. When you draw it all out, including both major extinction events, the scale of it is truly mind-blowing. And then how it has all been pieced together recently. The pure randomness and variety of what existed, and what persisted. Against all of it the unassuming horseshoe crab is a miracle that swam across a whole chunk of that time line. And yet, given the whole time line, they (and we) are a blink. And that means our blizzard is meaningless. This is what makes me happy. Not academic enough for any article or book, but the wonder of it exploded for me when I broke it down to teach a fifth grader. And I’ve been hooked on it ever since. “Geologic time, baby,” is the shorthand phrase Liz and I use all of the time in our household. The emotional equivalent for me of that “Let It Go” dopey Disney song.