Saturday, May 25th at 6:30pm
Description
CANARSIE PIER *NEW LOCATION(
Join NYC H2O and Professor Lisa Jeane Moore to see the horseshoe crabs as they come ashore for their mating ritual as they have done for the last 450 million years. Horseshoe crabs are trilobites, some of the planets’ oldest living creatures. They play a critical role in coastal ecology as scavengers whose eggs provide food for migrating birds. In the Northeast, horseshoe crabs numbers are declining due to loss of habitat as well as the over-harvesting of horseshoe crabs for biotech purposes and commercial bait.
Dr. Lisa Jean Moore is the author of Catch and Release and a Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at SUNY Purchase. She explores the interspecies relationships between humans and horseshoe crabs – our multiple sites of entanglement and enmeshment. Humans have literally harvested the life out of horseshoe crabs for multiple purposes; we interpret them for understanding geologic time, we bleed them for biomedical applications, we eat them as delicacies, we rescue them for conservation, we capture them as bait, and we categorize them as endangered after having once collected them for agricultural fertilizer. On the other hand, the crabs make humans matter by revealing our species vulnerability to endotoxins, offering career opportunities, profiting off of crab bodies, and fertilizing the soil of agricultural harvest for human food.
