My mother is from Cape Cod, MA. Periodically (when I was younger) we would go visit her parents in Provincetown. Which, of course, also meant a swim in the ocean. One of my mother’s sisters was a slightly mischievious individual who used to delight in telling us horror stories about horsehoe crabs. How they hid in the sand and stung unwary childre, how if you got stung you would bleed for months. Needless to say when we went to the ocean we tiptoed very cautiously around the beach. Everytime we saw a rock buried in the sand, evertime we saw anything slightly unusual we would start screaming for all we were worth “Horseshoe crabs! Help, they are going to get us!” We thought they were far meaner than sharks! Turns out they are related to spiders (and possibly trilobites).
Below is some horseshoe crab porn for all the Pharyngulans!
Rated M for mature.
Finally, there is, apparently, a museum devoted to horseshoe crabs! This is an intersting paper on horseshoe crab phlogeny. This site contains a lot of interesting info on horshoe crabs.
Filed under: Invertebrates | Tagged: Limulus polyphemus |
Afarensis: Anthropology, Evolution, and Science 
The first critter I ever brought home from the beach when I was very little was a dead horseshoe crab. I thought it was the coolest find ever. I had never seen one before, and assumed it was a rare and special thing. That probably started me on this long crazy path to posting pictures of critters on blogs.
We have an “M” rated picture of some slug sex over at the Dharma Bums!
Cool! The funnest thing about having kids or being around them is the great untruths you can tell them:)