A prehistoric resident survives in Brooklyn
Early each summer, the sands of Plumb Beach, in South Brooklyn, become scattered with lovers. At high tide, you can find them clutching one another in passionate embrace where the gentle waves of Jamaica Bay lap the sand. It may sound like the beach makeout scene in “From Here to Eternity,” but you won’t see anyone who looks even remotely like Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling around on the sand. What you will see are horseshoe crabs.
A group of nature lovers assembled at Plumb Beach Sunday evening for a guided tour of the action. With darkness falling and high tide on the way, it wasn’t long before dozens of the dome-shelled, spike-tailed arthropods could be seen dotting the white sand.
“Plumb Beach is a good place for it because it’s secluded and there’s not much wave action,” Alan Ascher, a naturalist who has been studying horseshoe crabs for decades, said during the tour. He recalled that growing up in the middle of Brooklyn, away from the coastline, he wasn’t aware of them until a high school zoology teacher took his class on a trip to see horseshoe crabs on Gerritsen Beach. “We saw hundreds of them.”