Crabs

Interspecies communication. After decades of encountering Ocypode ceratopthalmus at this early hour, I’d prefer a bit of progress. To be regarded as, if not bosom buddy, then not a threat. Man Friday to ghost crab Crusoes? Think how wolf-cub proto-dogs are said to have evolved themselves. Making nice, domesticating Homo sapiens. I watch a large bumblebee come to rest on the sand. Injured or worn out, moving slowly. The crabs surveil, furtively scurry to inspect, dart back in their herky-jerky way. Then attack. The bee resists but cannot fly. Is carried, wings flapping, into a victor’s burrow.

So: armored ghost crabs could train me to be of use as they clear away the dead and dying. Scavenger’s apprentice; undertaker first class; assistant gleaner. Lending the multi-clawed a hand. Or, since they live on the shoreline, I could study tides with them. For sure they’re tuned in to the moon, and, though invertebrates, must feel gravitational pull in their bones, so to speak.

Fond hope. “Il te faut m’apprivoiser,” Saint-Exupéry’s fox tells the Little Prince. It is necessary for you to tame me. But why should these crustaceans not be standoffish? Even . . . crabby. Oh, my New England childhood’s brutalities: lobsters, pincers rubber-banded, dropped—live—into boiling water. Merde, the Little Prince might have said.

Interspecies communication? Chesapeake Bay crab cakes. California’s Dungeness crab. Too late now. And, though I pay attention, why should ghost crabs understand me more than I understand them?

Informing myself. Book learnin’: for example, crabs are capable of autotomy, reflexive self-amputation of injured or trapped claws or legs. (Auto, “self ”; -tomy, “excision.” Think lobotomy / appendectomy / anatomy / dichotomy.) Which rings a bell. If we and the crabs are hardly kissin’ cousins, my selfish & self-promoting species can also self-sacrifice—body parts rarely, but memories and facts without effort. As if it’s inadvertent. Un-getting. “Slipped my mind,” we say. Just plain forgetful? Or does to forget entail will or (subconscious) intent—putting something out of one’s mind? Therapists argue this is the kind of thing we can “recover” after “suppression,” perhaps the way ghost crabs regenerate lost limbs.

Excision. Thirty years ago—who knows where the time goes?—a dazzlingly fecund reef in Fiji. A five-year-old’s hand in mine. In his other hand, a sea cucumber. Stressed. Eviscerating. Defending: pouring out parts of its gut, though the boy hadn’t intended to be a predator. Such gut-spilling something we too are capable of, though ours, seppuku aside, is to beg for mercy or to show off. The urge to confess: as definably human as the urge to deny.

Ghost crabs: their body asymmetry, ours; their incredible acceleration and speed, my envy; their apparent belligerence, mostly ritual confrontations, our countless / endless wars.

But what, really, can I know of the ghost crabs’ “immense world of delight,” as William Blake put it?