A Day at the Beach: Rising Sea Levels, Horseshoe Crabs, and Traffic Jams

Sociology2015, Vol. 49(5) 886 –902

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A Day at the Beach: Rising Sea Levels, Horseshoe Crabs, and Traffic Jams

Lisa Jean MoorePurchase College, State University of New York, USA

AbstractThe North American Horseshoe Crab (Limulus polyphemus) spawns on Plumb Beach, a New York City and National Park Service park that borders the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, New York. This sociological research article examines my experiences of joining a biological research team studying the reproductive practices of horseshoe crabs at different shoreline habitats. This article tracks how engaging in multispecies ethnography and intraspecies mindfulness changes my everyday life considerations as a human, sociologist, commuter and resident of New York City. Using contemporary social theories, I demonstrate the crabs, humans, cars, sand, eggs, water, wind live in a mesh with connections to ecologists, politicians, pharmaceutical companies, and geomorphology. I am sharing a revelatory moment of understanding my place as a researcher within the mesh, interconnected with the site of research, the objects of research, as well as global variables that are beyond human control (and possibly understanding).

KeywordsActor–Network Theory, animal studies, marine life, multispecies ethnography, sea level rise, urban studies

Brilliant sunshine burning off the metropolitan haze, salty sea breezes mixed with exhaust fumes, thumping music from passing windows, I’m already sweaty with the prospect of the day’s work. Although I drive this highway almost every day, sitting in traffic, going back and forth to work, cursing it and anticipating those familiar bumps and nicks on its surface, today is different. Arriving at the Plumb Beach comfort station, I creep off the painfully slow moving Belt Parkway, park the car, grab my camera, and slather SPF 60 over my face. As I arrive to the meeting spot, a biologist, paleontologist, ecologist and

Corresponding author:Lisa Jean Moore, State University of New York, Purchase College, SS1010, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, NY 10577, USA. Email: [email protected]

573474 SOC0010.1177/0038038515573474SociologyMooreresearch-article2015

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several undergraduate students are listening to instructions for our day’s work, measuring the size and assessing the quality of the horseshoe crab’s carapace. I’m excited by the prospect of handling the horseshoe crabs again – wading through the bay and picking them out of the water as they bend, wriggle and contort themselves in a comical motion, their 12 limbs wildly grasping in air. Smiling at the other humans, my fantasy is quickly interrupted as I look down and see a bloated rat, floating belly up, its body attempting to rest on the shore ending the relentless tidal ebb and flow (Figure 1).

No doubt this is an ‘urban’ beach as marine debris is abundant – shiny tampon appli-cators, old car tires, colorful plastic bags, partial beach toys, twisted condoms, ripped candy wrappers, broken beer bottles. To many humans, the ever-present flow of trash and urban detritus must interrupt the ‘commonplace appreciation of nature’ (Brewster and Bell, 2010) and prevent the loosening of social entanglements implicitly promised by our romantic notions of ‘a day at the beach’. Indeed the ‘natural-ness’ of Plumb Beach is ironic, as it has been the site of concerted efforts at sediment management – or the com-bination of strategies to ‘re-nourish’ shorelines. Primarily for the maintenance of the Belt Parkway (USACE, 2012) threatened by heavy beach erosion and sea level change, sand has been pumped, rubble added, grasses planted, dunes constructed, and jetties erected (Psuty et al., 2014). It’s for the highway that ‘nature’ was made to adapt.

The area I refer to as ‘Plumb Beach’ became acquired as New York City park property in 1924. But it has also become part of the Gateway National Recreation Area created by Congress in 1972 of the National Park Service. It is both city beach and federal park. In its present form, Plumb Beach offers the dense metropolis of New York City a sort of natural refuge through access to the beach and Jamaica Bay, a tidal estuary. Jamaica Bay has also been the site of a restoration plan to create and restore habitats that benefit native biota (USACE, 2004). The Rockaway Inlet that borders the three-mile Plumb Beach on

Figure 1. Dead rat on Plumb Beach.Source: Photograph by the author.

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the south and east is a dredged navigational channel. The beach has been geomorphologi-cally transformed through years by tides, winds, dredging, sediment management, and perhaps most significantly through the creation and ongoing maintenance of the Belt Parkway in the 1930s. In the words of a research assistant, ‘the whole idea of beach nour-ishment was not for this habitat but for the Belt Parkway.’ Envisioned by the infamous urban planner Robert Moses, this parkway is a major access route between three boroughs of New York City and storm evacuation route for all of Long Island’s human population of 7.5 million. It’s a road not unlike many others. It is not particularly scenic or residential; it is for going places, and it is policed and contributes to metropolitan haze. Over 150,000 cars travel on the Belt Parkway each day, making it the busiest principal artery between Queens and Brooklyn (NYC DOT, 2012). Sociologically, it is both a mundane site of human everyday life and an extraordinary site of sociotechnical intervention.

In the last three post-Hurricane Sandy (2012) years, nourishment projects at Plumb Beach have effectively dissected the beach – these distinct geographic zones are now referred to as before the jetty and after the jetty. A jetty is breakwater constructed of large rocks or cement positioned perpendicular to the shoreline to protect a coast by interrupt-ing the waves. To protect the highway, 127,000 cubic yards of fill were added, in addition to the breakwater structures, to before the jetty, also referred to as the NYC Beach. After the jetty is also known as the ‘natural’ beach and is maintained by the National Park Service. Taken as a whole, the constellation of Plumb Beach is continually becoming different things to different beings. It is a barrier protecting the teeming metropolis’ cru-cial transportation route, a playground for neoprene outfitted kite surfers, a cruising locale for men, a site of variegated trash piles that double as domiciles for insects, and an aquatic habitat for flora and fauna, which includes varieties of seaweed, horseshoe crabs, sea gulls, fiddler crabs, hermit crabs, jellyfish, fluke and mud snails.

Before embarking on this research project, I was, like most others, an ordinary driver on this road making my everyday way here and there. Like most, my everyday was and is inflected with a great many things that go unnoticed. But in this process of learning about another species as a sociologist – becoming a human in a world with other species, I entered into a new set of social-scientific relations and acquired an appreciation and knowledge of a messy network of horseshoe crabs, the Belt Parkway and the effects of global warming. This experience has in turn affected how I experience ordinary every-day life as a resident and commuter in New York City. As feminist physicist Karen Barad (2007: 150) offers, ‘Humans are neither pure cause or pure effect but part of the world in its open-ended becoming.’ This article is about my reflections on thought frameworks (my sociological ones in particular but also others) that humans invent and improvise in order to understand and control our environments, non-human beings and other objects. I am sharing a revelatory moment of understanding my place as a researcher within a network and a mesh, interconnected with the site of research, the objects of research, as well as global variables that are beyond human control (and possibly understanding).

Handling Horseshoe Crabs

Plumb Beach is the site of ongoing multiple biological, ecological, and (my own) socio-logical research projects to understand how to manage the coming ecological crisis of

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global warming. Specifically, this article illustrates how the everyday life experiences of humans and parkways coincide and intra-act with the everyday lives of horseshoe crabs on an urban beach. While it is true that horseshoe crabs have no use on a daily basis for parkways, I show that the everyday wear and tear on the parkway, the encroaching sea-waters, and human reliance on the parkway is deeply consequential to the crab’s habitat. Humans go to great efforts to maintain the parkway for their daily activities, which in turn leads to changes in daily life for crabs.

However, not all humans share the goal of ‘taming’ the wild in the service of the urban space (Kalekin-Fishman, 2013). While some humans want to protect the highway at any cost, others see themselves as stewards of other species. Mark Botton, my key informant, sides with the crabs. Mark, a 50-something marine biologist from Fordham University, is one of the world’s foremost horseshoe crab researchers, having dedicated over 25 years to understanding the species, its habits, behaviors, and reproduction. During three months of near weekly visits to Plumb Beach, he introduced me to the species and showed me how to handle adults, locate juveniles, dig for eggs, evaluate the quality of outer shells (carapace), and identify anatomical differences to sex the crabs. And he also taught me how to appreciate the size of females (‘she’s a big one’), marvel at the skillful swimming (‘look at how he navigates with his telson, gliding in the water’), worry about their daily challenges (‘now she’s trying to flip herself back over and she’ll either dry out or get eaten by gulls, if she doesn’t right herself’) and fawn over the young ones (‘come here cutie, we just want to measure you’). Mark has mediated my understanding of the everyday life of the crab, including its movements, routines, and struggles. In time, I developed a burgeoning ‘feeling for the organism’ (Fox Keller, 1983) and earned Mark’s highest praise, ‘You would have been a good field biologist.’

Figure 2. Measuring the carapace of horseshoe crab on Plumb Beach. This is a mated pair and satellite males covered in barnacles.Source: Photograph by the author.

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Training with Mark, I am now able to go out and observe crabs on my own. I have refined my own method of intraspecies mindfulness. Intraspecies mindfulness is a prac-tice of speculation about nonhuman species that strives to resist anthropomorphic reflec-tions (Moore and Kosut, 2013). It is an attempt at getting at, and with, another species in order to move outside our selves. Our creation of the term and practice of intraspecies mindfulness is predominately drawn from the work of Barad (2007). Her articulation of intra-action is where worlds come into being through the mutual constitution of entan-gled entities. This requires that as fieldworkers we interrupt our tendency to think of crabs as the object of study and that we resist thinking of ourselves, or the crabs, as static, bounded and permanently fixed entities. Instead we need to see all – ourselves, beaches, crabs and other objects – as bodies that are in the world and whose boundaries are created through everyday entanglements and conflicts.

Walking up and down the shore, I’ve spent hours watching crabs glide through the water settling on the bottom to burrow into the sand. The slippery brownish carapace becomes its own ecology with barnacles, bryozoans, slipper shells, and flatworms living on the exterior surface (see Figure 2). Male crabs attach themselves with a clasper claw to the back of females and travel sometimes for weeks in this piggy-back style moving up and down the shoreline with the tides. Spawning time at Plumb Beach thrills the research team as they monitor reproductive pairs and satellite males hoping to release their sperm over waiting eggs. This intensive focus on the trials and tribulations of the crabs over their life cycles has unmoored, slightly, my perspective. I’ve become more attuned to the crabness of these animals (what they are in and for themselves) and dis-placed, somewhat, my instrumental view of crabs (what are crabs to humans).

I situate my work as part of the growing field of multispecies ethnography, located at the intersections of environmental studies, science and technology studies, and animal studies. In particular I am intrigued by work that brings to light understudied organisms. Multispecies ethnography is a new genre and mode of anthropological research that seeks to bring ‘organisms whose lives and deaths are linked to human social worlds’ closer into focus as living co-constitutive subjects, rather than simply relegating them to ‘part of the landscape, as food for humans, (or) as symbols’ (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010: 545).

Translating and transferring concepts such as ordinary or ‘everyday life’ of the crab is probably of limited theoretical value. The crab, I would speculate, has no sense of ordi-nary or extraordinary, monotonous or eventful, so exploring and extracting information about crabs in the frame of the ordinary is ‘for’ humans. Rather, I suggest we consider the crab in an entanglement in the classical Latourian or Callonian (1986) way, whereby crabs and humans and highways and sand (as well as other objects and phenomena) are in a milieu and connected to, for example, urban transformation, general eco-urgency, shifts in more-than-human rights discourses, and commerce between scientific practices and local biologies.

This framing would require that the horseshoe crab is reanimated as an actor, drawing from the lens of Actor–Network Theory and critical animal studies work. Moving beyond human interpretations of crabs, and anthropomorphic descriptions, I consider the possibil-ity of the agency of the horseshoe crab: ‘A good ANT account is a narrative or a descrip-tion or a proposition where all the actors do something and don’t just sit there’ (Latour, 2007: 128). Emphasis is placed on accounting for the nonhuman others embedded within

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a research site, and within larger socio-political networks. Using network analysis to understand the everyday workings of heterogeneous networks, I work to ‘find a way to treat all components in a system on equal terms’ (Law, 1987: 130). My hope is to acquire a knowledge that is ‘for’ humans but that can be used to inform human attempts to accom-modate, in this case, crabs and, by extension, other objects and phenomena. Another goal is to contribute to the burgeoning field of multispecies ethnography and to address the space between human/non-human by using the theories of ANT, the mesh, and intraspecies mindfulness to position the crab, the highway, the sand through networks of ethnographic data and translation.

My analysis draws on insights of Latour, Callon, Law, Barad and philosopher Timothy Morton to understand relations and matter. Each of these approaches can contribute something, which, together, can help bring into relief the life of the crab and the mesh. Whereas the use of network, as explicated above, is also useful, I wish to move away from the implicit neatness that a network might imply because its linearity and implicit sense of logic seems inaccurate. So I am inspired by Morton’s notion of the lives of everyday objects, humans, horseshoe crabs, highways, sand grains, entangled in a mesh and I move toward a mesh as a concept that implies the space between. Perhaps the spaces between are spaces where objects intra-act without a human interlocutor and have their own relationality that makes things happen:

A mesh consists of relationships between crisscrossing strands of metal and gaps between the strands. Meshes are potent metaphors for the strange interconnectedness of things, an interconnectedness that does not allow for perfect lossless transmissions of information, but is instead full of gaps and absences. When an object is born it is instantly enmeshed into a relationship with other objects in the mesh. (Morton, 2013: 83)

This article investigates this mesh of the horseshoe crabs, the Belt Parkway, the scientists (including myself), and the beach in intra-action with the hyperobject of global warming.

Horseshoe Crabs as Multi-use Objects

This article is part of a larger project on North Atlantic Horseshoe Crabs. They are arthropods –meaning they have no backbone or skeleton. Rather they, like ticks, spi-ders, and scorpions, have jointed legs and hard outer covering to protect a soft body. After spawning during high tides in March through July on the Eastern coast of North America, horseshoe crab eggs develop within the beach sediments after a couple of weeks to reach the trilobite (first instar) larval stage (Jegla and Costlow, 1982; Laughlin, 1983). They become reproductive adults, after 16 to 17 molts or 8 to 10 years. Significantly, humans have not been able to breed crabs in captivity beyond their 10th molt with limited scientific explanation of why this might be so (Sixto Portillo, 2014, personal communication). Picking up a crab is relatively simple since they do not pinch, bite or sting. As well, they are not too fragile for humans to handle.

As described above, I’ve joined a team of local biologists and geologists from Kingsborough Community College and Fordham University on a census and assessment of the species. These crabs are found around the Long Island Sound beaches in the metropoli-tan areas of New York City – from urban to isolated beaches. In North America, the ocean

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dwelling horseshoe crab, a strange looking animal, crawls along the ocean floor with its maroon helmet-like hard-shelled top, 10 eyes, and six pairs of appendages (legs and claws) underneath. A non-poisonous 4 to 5 inch hard tail called a telson is used to steer and drags along at its end as it lumbers along the shoreline. Adult crabs weigh about 3 to 5 pounds, 18–19 inches in length from head to tail for females, a few inches shorter for males, and during spawning are either on the beach around high tide or swimming in 2 to 3 feet of water. They are ‘slow and easy to catch’ making them an ideal species for field biologists to study. Globally, there are four living species of horseshoe crabs – one in North America, deemed lower risk/near threatened which according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature means they are not at risk of extinction – and three in Southeast and East Asia, deemed data deficient or without sufficient information to assess.

With a fossil record to establish their lineage, horseshoe crabs are considered prehis-toric. According to geologist Blazej Blazejowski, when traced through modification by descent, crabs haven’t changed morphologically over tens of millions of years and as such are stabilomorphs, organisms that are morphologically stable through time and space. Their closest relatives are trilobites from 480 million years ago. The horseshoe crab has survived longer than 99% of all animals that have ever lived (Fredericks, 2012). The ancient species is also remarkable because it is primarily aquatic, coming onto the shore for spawning and nesting for brief periods every year. Not exclusively based on its peculiar appearance, the crab qualifies as anthropologist Stefan Helmreich’s (2009: xi) alien – ‘the alien inhabits perceptions of the sea as a domain inaccessible to direct, unme-diated human encounter.’ For decades, humans have been drawn to the crab because it unlocks secrets about the ‘sea of life’. Furthermore, I would argue, unlike many domes-ticated animals or pets, crabs are not knowable since their primary place of residence is uninhabitable by humans and cannot be successfully replicated in an artificial way for the horseshoe crab’s lifespan.

Despite their prehistoric and alien status, crabs are exploited by humans in North America and Asia in several ways. The well-known biologist Robert Loveland explained that the Anthropocene has already witnessed four major epochs of use/threat to horse-shoe crabs. (He examined them in a linear history, which I adopt here; importantly, there are other narratives of crabs outside of the for-some-humans historical narrative that I hope to examine in future work.) At the beginning of the last century, Loveland explained, the local populations of crabs began to decline precipitously. Horseshoe crabs were hand-harvested and ground up for agricultural fertilizer until they were replaced by chemical fertilizers in the 1960s (Berkson and Shuster, 1999). After a measurable dip in their numbers, the population bounced back in the 1970s.

The next epoch of threat began in the 1990s and is ongoing. Crabs are caught by fish-ermen who use them as bait for eels (Anguilla rostrata) and whelks (Busycon carica and Busycotypus canaliculatum) and are worth an impressive US$5 each (Walls et al., 2002). The eels and whelk are shipped where they have ‘huge markets in Asia’ and ‘fuel fisher-men’s livelihood here’ (Rebecca Anderson, 2014, personal communication). The harvesting of crabs is supposedly controlled, limited and managed through a patchwork of intra- and interstate regulations including the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (Figure 3).1 Despite these regulatory apparatuses, many of my informants believe there is great variability in enforcement and as a result there are several reports of a black market in horseshoe crabs.2

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Another not insignificant reason for the harvest of horseshoe crab is biomedical use. The crab’s blood is used to create Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL). Since the 1970s, in order to get FDA approval on any pharmaceutical product such as injectable, implanta-ble, or biological/medical devices, there must be an LAL test conducted to detect any possible bacterial contamination (Levin et al., 2003). Jennifer Mattei, an environmental ecologist and project director for the citizen science program Project Limulus, explained that when presenting to lay people, ‘It’s always satisfying to say when holding up a crab, “the shocker is that everyone’s health in this room depends on the Horseshoe crab – their blood makes sure that there is no bacteria on your flu vaccines, surgical devices and pharmaceuticals.”’ Chris Ferullo, an undergraduate field biology assistant, explained that we would have horseshoe crab farms if it were possible to raise them in captivity. Since that’s not possible, ‘we developed this catch and release system.’ Crabs are captured, bled and released. There are differing rates of mortality reported, ranging between 10–15% dying after capture, bleeding and release (Novtisky, 2009) as well as ongoing research that examines the short and long term effects of bleeding on crabs (Anderson, Watson and Chabot, 2013).

The fourth threat to crabs, and most important for the purposes of this article, is the loss of habitat occurring through what Loveland identifies as the ‘ongoing sea level rise and our response to it.’ Mattei admires horseshoe crabs as ‘habitat generalists,’ creatures able to live and survive across a lengthy and varied terrain, from Maine to the Yucatan Peninsula. Despite this expansive habitat and ability to adapt to a variety of environmen-tal stressors, Mattei and many other scientists worry that crabs might face an ‘extinction vortex.’ Crabs need a critical mass to breed (Shuster, 1979) and with harvesting and changing shorelines, there is the potential for a lost generation of horseshoe crabs. As the

Figure 3. Photo of Comfort Station signage at Plumb Beach taken on 14 July 2014.Source: Photograph by the author.

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ecologist explains, ‘They can tolerate low numbers but there could be a tipping point where they have local extinction because they can’t find each other. Crabs, while not deemed threatened in North America, do experience the potential for local extinction.’ Clearly certain humans are concerned about the reproductive habitat of horseshoe crabs as local populations are faced with shrinking shoreline for spawning.

Ecologist Christina Colon agreed with this prognosis as we walked along the beach.

I worry that we see no new young ones coming up. There appears to be a break in the chain and if we miss a generation of juveniles, how will they find each other 10–15 years from now for mating?

Colon added, ‘Humans, like beavers, and elephants are really good landscape engineers and have changed the landscape to kill the shorelines and beaches through bulkheading and dredging.’ It is this threat that the research at Plumb Beach attempts to measure and interpret. How has human engineering of the shoreline in direct response to sea level rise (SLR) affected the everyday habitat and reproduction of crabs? How have crabs’ changes in reproductive practices affected the human enterprises of biological and ecological knowledge production?

Beach Nourishment and What it Means for Horseshoe Crab Reproduction

The nourishment of Plumb Beach provides a laboratory for sociological and biological analysis of the before and after beaches. Sea level rise (SLR) is one of the effects of global warming. Global warming in Tim Morton’s lexicon is a hyperobject, ‘massively distributed in time and space relative to humans’ (2013: 1). He continues,

global warming plays a very mean trick. It comes very, very close, crashing into our beaches … and yet withdrawing from our grasp in the very same gesture, so that we can only represent it by using computers with tremendous processing speed. (Morton, 2013: 133)

For Morton, there is no doubt that global warming has happened and is continuing to happen – and yet because of humans’ limited abilities to perceive global warming in the immediate sense, it is difficult to materially apprehend it. As a result, global warming is present in the everyday while at the same time withdrawn from our apprehension. We rarely think of sea level rise while sitting in traffic on the Belt Parkway going to work, getting home, making a flight at Kennedy airport, or going to the beach. But it is there in the everyday as we occasionally register the ‘Evacuation Route’ signage on the side of the road. The ever-present and yet invisible anxiety about the changing landscape has become ordinary or, in anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s words, ‘a drifting immersion that watches and waits for something to pop up’ (2007: 95).

One existing ecological research project at Plumb Beach seeks to determine what is the best sand habitat for the horseshoe crab to reproduce and thrive. When the beach is ‘nourished,’ rubble, cinderblocks, sand bags are added to the dune area, and dredged sand is pumped at the shoreline to create a new beach. The team of field biologists is measuring both the quantity and quality of crab eggs as well as the density and quality of

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sand at both the before and after the jetty beaches. Based on initial observations, the team thinks the sand at the new beach is too fine and therefore too tightly packed for the crab’s reproduction. Mark Botton explained to me as we were walking down the beach to do a juvenile count:

Once nourishment was completed, the horseshoe crabs weren’t too impressed with the newly restored beaches – and preferred the reference site after the jetty. In fact, in the summer of 2012, this area of nourishment had absolutely no ecological value for horseshoe crabs. After Hurricane Sandy, and once they put the breakwater in (jetty) and added more sand, these sediments here were harder and that harder sand is, and we know this from previous studies, that crabs can discriminate between different sediment type, and they prefer the softer, the better aerated sands.

Thinking about this I asked Mark, ‘So is a meta goal of your work to figure out what is the best way to do beach nourishment and make the crabs have a healthy habitat?’ Mark is cautious in making claims until all the data are collected and analyzed:

We don’t really know if it is definitely the sand that drives them down the beach to reproduce and we have to see the data from 2014 to see if they are coming back and what the sand quality is [He paused to assess the tides and winds for our work]. But a policy recommendation could be that beach replenishment needs to do a better matching of the sand to the type that works for horseshoe crab’s reproduction. But then there are the financial constraints of where and how to get the sand and that comes into play. The horseshoe crabs are never the priority.

Figure 4. This image represents the practice of coring through hammering PVC pipes into an area of sand then emptying the full pipe into plastic baggies to capture the crabs’ eggs inside – then a census of these eggs is performed, after the sand is filtered in the lab. After they’re counted in the laboratory, the eggs are returned to the bay.Source: Photograph by the author.

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Here he is acknowledging that while horseshoe crabs might be his priority, when the fis-cal concerns of saving the beach for the highway for transportation come into play, crabs do not rank in most human’s considerations.

Marshaling the tools of a PVC pipe, a mallet, a penetrometer, plastic baggies, and sifters, humans both enhance and create their ability to measure differences between the two sites (Figure 4). We mallet the pipes into the beach as a means of collecting eggs. We arrange ourselves in one of the comparison areas and randomly toss the PVC pipes to land on the sand, then taking the mallet we hammer the pipe in, pull it out, and shake the pipe into baggies to collect the sand. A penetrometer is a gadget that measures the compression strength of sediments. As Mark explains, ‘it works like a spring scale in reverse. There’s a spring with a calibrated scale; if you have a very compacted soil, you have to push the spring greater distance before the soil gives way.’ Using this device, we are able to measure how compact the sand is.

These non-human objects, as well as the humans, the crabs and global warming ‘make the world’ of research at Plumb Beach operating in a constellation of the hyperobject of global warming. Non-human actors engage their capacities and properties in the process making sense of the everyday experiences of global warming, sea level rise, traffic, beach nourishment, geomorphology and crab reproductive and mortality rates. True to the Latourian ANT, all objects must be considered in this productive landscape to guard against anthropocentric ways of knowing:

Knowledge, morality, craft, force, sociability are not properties of humans but of humans accompanied by their retinue of delegated characters. Since each of those delegates ties together part of our social world, it means that studying social relations without the nonhumans is impossible. (Johnson, 1988: 310)

The nourished/before the jetty beach is composed of harder sand of more uniform texture and over a three year period, fewer eggs were found at the before the jetty beach. During the same period, horseshoe crabs were reproducing on the after the jetty beach consist-ently (Figure 5). Using a penetrometer, researchers determined that there were ‘not immediate ecological benefits to the horseshoe crab’ from the nourishment project possibly because ‘oxygen doesn’t diffuse into the sediment.’ Importantly, based on egg counts for 2014, there was reason to believe that over time, as the wind pushed the sand down the beach and the ocean currents turned over the beach before the jetty, crabs were beginning to return to the before the jetty beaches as the sand changed. They adapt to their environ-ments over time. However, in the arms race against rising tides, beach nourishment will happen at a quicker pace potentially hampering the crabs’ ability to adapt at such a speed. In other words, as sea levels rise more quickly, beaches are nourished more rapidly, Horseshoe crabs may not be able to make the sped-up adjustments to spawn.

Chris Ferullo, research assistant, explains:

The NYC beaches we used the penetrometer to test how hard it is to penetrate the sand. We are finding it is much harder to penetrate the sand on the side with the nourishment versus the side with no nourishment. Because the sand they took out of the trench when they dredged was too fine and creating too compact of a surface so when you dig down 8 to 10 cm deep it just becomes like black because no oxygen can get down there. So you start to understand that when

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horseshoe crab lay their eggs 15–20 cm deep, you understand, why they can’t dig there, and when they bury them back up the eggs, these eggs wouldn’t be able to get enough oxygen to develop. So we are trying to figure out with these new changes, how that is affecting the current in the area to see if the current churns up the sand, there and over time the sand will become less uniform and allow for more oxygen and start to be more favorable to horseshoe crabs.

Essentially then, the finding is that while beach nourishment extends the ‘life’ of the Belt Parkway, urban transportation, human and vehicular traffic, the horseshoe crabs do not use the newly nourished beach. They must make reproductive choices that steer them from new sediment. Over time, as the sediment mixes up, they will readjust to breeding grounds that suit their needs. But if beach nourishment was practiced on the entirety of Plumb Beach, we can only speculate that the crabs could vacate the beach for the time it takes for sediment to become less uniform. We could speculate about where the crabs would go. As they have been unusually adaptable species, managing previous climate changes and radi-cal habitat alterations, they clearly have a way of adjusting their reproductive practices.

Endangered and Transformational Objects in the Mesh

What are the micro-ontological intraspecies considerations to engage when performing a multi-species, ANT/ethnography? If horseshoe crabs and humans are considered in a flat or relational ontology, our interest in crabs should not be limited to their value for humans. However, this is challenging because it is virtually impossible to interpret any-thing outside of the perspective of humanness despite actively engaging in intraspecies mindfulness.

Furthermore, the Belt Parkway is deeply consequential to where crabs and humans live and reproduce. The fact is, landscape plays a role in their habitat, just as their existence

Figure 5. The author holding juvenile horseshoe crabs collected during a census. These juveniles were found in July 2014 but hatched from eggs laid the previous year.Source: Photograph by the author.

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plays a role in our ability to drive on the parkway. If, for example, the horseshoe crab were deemed endangered by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), a team of concerned humans, including marine biologists, microbiologists, ecologists, eco-toxicologists, paleontologists, and conservationists, it would change the way the habitat bordering the Belt Parkway was managed. The IUCN Horseshoe Crab Specialist Group has formed to collect data for the Red Listing of the four living species of Horseshoe Crabs. The Red List is IUCN’s comprehensive evaluation of global plant and animal spe-cies and their relative threat of extinction. The procedure for assessing the risk of species extinction involves monitoring and compiling empirical data. After many bureaucratic hoops including a complicated series of forms and spreadsheets (one member quipped – ‘it should be called Red Taping’), a species is given a designation somewhere on the continuum of extinct to least concern. Since the crab is not classified as endangered, beach nourishment is not hampered by considerations of species maintenance.

What might be some of the effects of global warming as a hyperobject on the every-day life of the horseshoe crab, humans and the parkway? Sea Level Rise has caused beach nourishment interventions to occur to save the parkway. The saving of the parkway has caused the horseshoe crab to move down the beach to preserve their reproductive practices, and it may also mean that more people will drive by Plumb Beach than will stop there, or that certain kinds of people will stop there by taking the care to go this way or that. The field biologists are also kinds of people and manage apparatuses to create the perceptions or conditions or both for the life of the crab in relation to humans and to their institutions with respect to the Environmental Protection Agency, National Park Service, and many others.

At a bare minimum, crabs are appropriated in part for research into markers of shore-line health, biopharmaceutical bleeding, and transnational bait use. The species is con-nected to global flows of information and intellectual capital and academic research funding and pharmaceutical or biotechnological research and related to lobbyists and policy makers/legislators.

This network means that if the crab does something one season, such as lay fewer eggs, it may send ripples through the whole configuration of participants/actants. In this way, the crabs are actants but they are also something more in a mesh. One might say that their rhythmic ‘instinctual’ reproductive behaviors are like transformational objects for humans – making things happen for humans, which reverberates for crabs (Bollas, 1989). Humans affectively, imaginatively, and fetishistically invest this transformational object of the crab to the point that they become sacred or powerful. A transformational object constantly alters the environment to fit the needs of the subject. Bollas developed the term in relation to a mother and infant where the mother manages the environment for the infant’s comfort. Adults search for the transformational object as a way of under-standing the ‘metamorphosis of the self’ (Bollas, 1989: 16) and to modify the external environment as a way of changing the internal mood. ‘We may imagine the self as the transformational facilitator, and we may invest ourselves with capacities to alter the environment that are not only impossible but embarrassing on reflection’ (Bollas, 1989: 17). Humans believe that they can manage global warming, SLR, or horseshoe crabs – remarkably since global warming has already happened, SLR is relentless and inevitable, and crabs have pretty much been living for millennia facing vast changes in climate throughout their prehistoric legacy.

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The habits and ways of the crab that shift affect in ways ‘our’ everyday, subtly, in diffuse ways, over seasons and years. Changes, being affected, can take on many forms or non-forms because they are broadly constellated and widely diffused across space and order of phenomena and across time, for example. Every single day people take the Belt Parkway and try to distract themselves from the monotony of the drive, the traffic, the drone, the exhaust, the boredom. And every day horseshoe crabs make their lives in the bay that bor-ders the parkway. The crabs, humans, cars, sand, eggs, water, wind, live in a mesh intraact-ing with ecologists, politicians, pharmaceutical companies, and geomorphology.

For sociologists of everyday life, we might want to ask on the daily and mundane frame, what geomorphic worlds get made and un-made? Or more sociologically put, for whose benefit do geomorphologic worlds come into being and disappear? It is true that crabs are being harvested for a variety of reasons. But is the point to not only make peo-ple aware of these exploits, but to get them to start acknowledging and appreciating the relationship between human and non-human objects? It feels as if it is limited to believe my research is to just to raise awareness of appreciating roads, and cars, and sand grains, and crabs. I believe this is why I have found this summer, an everyday envy of the work of the material conclusions of the field biologist. Ecologically, Mark Botton, my inform-ant, has contributed substantially to what we ‘know’ about crabs and his work offers concrete ‘so what’s’ for its Results Section. For example, he has suggested that the suit-ability of shoreline versus the water quality is limiting the breeding and thriving oppor-tunities for horseshoe crabs and therefore he argues for the very material increase in the amount of sandy beach for crabs spawning and egg maturation (Botton et al., 2006). If my work is about changing the texture of the mesh, by trying to get inside of it with the crab, and beach, and the parkway, what is my everyday ‘so what’?

Everyday Sociologies Redux

There is a tendency to approach animal studies projects with a sense of awe and wonder or as part of a narrative of prophetic guidance. If the horseshoe crabs, honeybees, sharks and cockroaches are our Darwinian betters, we might do well to try and learn something from them. They’ve weathered the storm, the story goes, so let’s understand their adapta-tions, while we also come to realize we are their biggest threat and develop ‘clubs’ to ‘help save the ________’. I am attempting to resist these sensational anthropocentric tendencies; however seductive it is to revel in details of other species’ habits or elevate one’s self to savior – flipping over crabs.

Rather, I call for a repositioning of the scientific narrator as actor, along with the objects of narration, so that we can understand the everyday (and ourselves) less as con-structing static narrative and more as enmeshed in a dynamic dialogue. At the same time while we might be drawn to the dramatic differences and the extremes of non-human animals, the substance of the ordinary and everyday is not less important than the epic, the extraordinary or the catastrophic. To borrow from Dorothy Smith (1987), just as we must not repudiate the everyday world of women since it contains valuable ways of knowing that interrupt the relations of ruling, non-human animals’ seemingly banal and repetitive daily lives expose our ideological biases.

We need to interrupt our tendency to think of crabs as the object of study. The object is perhaps more the mesh and our place and other objects’ place in it – as well as its

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existence with or without humans. We have to resist thinking of ourselves or the beach as static, bounded and permanently fixed entities. Instead we need to see all – ourselves, crabs, the beach, the sand, the highway and other objects as bodies that are in the world and whose boundaries are created through entanglements and conflicts.

As I consider this mesh while waiting in traffic on the Belt Parkway, it transforms my everyday ordinary. Returning to Stewart (2007: 1), ‘The ordinary is a shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life.’ The monotony of the drive is now my diesel car pumping out fumes adding to the already inexorable engine generating sea level rise. The ongoing shoreline management through coordinated efforts of humans, machines and natural resources to protect the parkway make this drive possible. But what is it for horseshoe crab? My time with the crab is not sufficient to be able to speak to their everyday lives. But beyond that my species’ limitations means that I can never know their everyday lives. Maybe though, I can know my own everyday as part of the mesh where there is something interesting here about being ‘in nature,’ about Barad’s materiality, about being part of the worlds we study. The profound aspect of doing this research for me has been to be taught that we share our worlds, and we don’t know we’re sharing them. Human everyday is often deeply anthropocentric and also deeply techno-centric; but not always organism-centric. In very material ways, and everyday, humans are becoming with horseshoe crabs.

My project of everyday becoming with horseshoe crabs could be interventionist in a number of ways, beyond how it intervenes in the way earthly beings think about their co-inhabitants of this ecosystem. Sociological research participates in ecological interventions on both personal and public levels. Since, everyday, despite getting better mileage, diesel engines produce more CO2 emissions and they are unhealthy for crabs and humans, my next purchase will likely be a hybrid car. I also question in a real way the city’s dependence on the parkway if we humans practiced intraspecies mindfulness and work to build environments with other species. New forms of engineering could be a win/win for (some) humans and the crabs if we found other ways to get through daily life than driving to and fro on a sinking strip of asphalt.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to acknowledge the extremely helpful comments from Mark Botton, Paisley Currah, Monica J Casper, Heidi Durkin, Julian Kreimer, Kyle Moran, Robyn Mierzwa, Jason Pine and Jennifer Terry on earlier versions of this article.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

1. Horseshoe crabs are managed under the lnterstate Fishery Management Plan for Horseshoe Crab (1998), and under Addenda I (2000), II (2001), and III (2004), which can be found on the ASMFC website at www.asmfc.org or by contacting the ASMFC Habitat Specialist at (202) 289-6400.

2. See, for example, two New York City related news stories about horseshoe crab poach-ing: Cops Nab Two in Horseshoe Crab Heist Gone Wrong. Available at: http://gothamist.

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com/2013/05/29/horseshoe_crab_grabbers_get_nabbed.php and Poachers are Elusive Catch in City Waters. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/nyregion/poachers-are-elusive-catch-in-city-waters.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. (Both accessed 17 February 2015).

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Lisa Jean Moore is a Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Purchase College, SUNY. She is the author of several books including Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid and The Body: Social and Cultural Dissections with Monica J Casper. A founding co-editor of the Biopolitics Book Series at NYU Press, she lives in Crown Heights Brooklyn. Her most recent pas-sion is studying horseshoe crab and human intra-actions.

Date submitted August 2014Date accepted January 2015

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