I see them first as a faint rippling in the sand, the smooth wet sand left behind as the waves retreat. My beachgoing reverie, nourished in part by the sheen of sunlight on that ribbon of ocean edge, is shaken ever so slightly as that sheen wrinkles an instant before the next wave slides up the beach to erase it. Wading into the water I see a few gray shells tumbling in the surf; my curiosity aroused, I dig into the soft wet sand and lift a handful.
Instantly my hand comes alive: no dull, inert sand here, but a hundred kicking legs, digging into my fingers, tunneling, scratching, desperate to escape. Mole crabs! Emerita talpoida—egg-shaped, sand-colored creatures, not crab-like at all but domed and rounded like miniature VW bugs, perfectly shaped for burrowing in the sand, varying in size from barely visible to almost the size of a quarter, “living in the turmoil of broken waves on sandy beaches, moving up and down the beach with the tide, and . . . feeding on organic debris caught by feathery antenna,” as K. L. Gosner so aptly summarizes this odd life in his Field Guide to the Atlantic Seashore. With dozens of mole crabs in each square foot of sand, filtering each retreating wave with “feathery antenna,” no wonder the sand wrinkles and winks in the sun.
It’s alive . . .
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