The New Jersey Shoreline

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Delaware Bay's prime breeding beaches are also a burial ground. Thousands of the crabs lie dead, overturned by breaking waves, their hollow shells littering the sand like the discarded helmets of a defeated German battalion. Just yards away, oblivious to the noxious stench of rotting crabs, migratory shorebirds feast on exposed crab eggs, consuming about 100 tons in just a few weeks.

On a recent sunny morning, plucky Alison Akke, 15 months old and dressed in a dainty blue sundress, is lugging two horseshoe crabs by their spiny tails toward the water. Nearby, her mother Emma, 35, peers at one until it wriggles and then gingerly hauls it away. She and her daughter line up the crabs, side by side, along the beach just above the incoming tide. Besides saving some crabs, they have also tidied the sand, once littered with topsy-turvy animals. Quips Alison's mom: "Instead of mowing my grass, I come out here and clear my beach."

Theresa Tierney, sweating from her early-morning walk on the beach, carefully treads past the mating crabs. Each summer Tierney and her family trade the Philadelphia heat for a bay-front seat at crab-mating time. As a live crab trundles by her feet, she snatches it up by its spiny tail to reveal an underbelly of writhing legs and pulsing book gills. Despite years of such intimate contact with the crabs, she is still unable to unlock one vital secret. Murmurs a slightly embarrassed Tierney: "I can't even tell what sex it is." Her husband Matt and son Matthew, 8, could not care less about a crab's sex. With a devilish grin, Matthew places a roll of firecrackers under a hollow crab shell and steps away as his father lights the fuse. Ka-boom! That's one way to clear the beach.

Fireworks aside, the horseshoe crab, like the cockroach, seems designed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Some have withstood a month without food; others have weathered boat propellers and bullet wounds.

Dave Welsh knows. He's down at Reed's Beach, fishing with his father. For the umpteenth time since he worked these waters as a boy, Welsh, now 42, curses and starts reeling in his line. Nothing biting today except the horseshoe crab. Agitated, he untangles one from his line and tosses it back. He has few kind words for the crabs; the fact is, he finds inanimate objects more provocative. "Each year, you see ten or 20 articles about the crabs, but you never see any about the sandbars," he bellyaches, pointing to the tidal flats along the bay's eastern shore. "The sandbars are more interesting."

Not really. But what does one do with a horseshoe crab? Plenty, it turns out. Indians once used their tails for spearheads, and farmers have ground up the crabs for fertilizer and for hog and chicken feed. Some locals varnish dead ones for knickknacks, and others chop them up for eel bait.

Jim Finn makes money from the crabs. He runs a small company that converts the crabs' blood into the limulus amoebocyte-lysate test used to detect contamination in drugs and other medical products. Each year Finn pays college students to collect crabs and siphon their rich blue blood, which possesses remarkable clotting properties. After donating their blood, the crabs, no worse for the wear, are tagged and tossed back into the bay.