Horseshoes, anyone?

So, this time I was not lazy, this time I was gone! While many very interesting and exciting things happened, there are only pictures of some of them. BUT, one thing I did document (almost excessively) was my first exposure to the craziest beach critter I have ever seen. What is this mysterious beast, you ask? Well... check it out...

This is a horseshoe crab... which apparently is called a crab but which is really more related to spiders and ticks. Also, my totally non-scientific googling efforts further taught me that they have not had to evolve much in the last 250 million years mainly because they're almost impossible to eat, can apparently go up to a year without eating themselves, and they can live up to about 30 years.

Anyhow, we were apparently lucky enough to arrive during mating season, as you can see here:

Essentially, what you're looking at here is a horseshoe crab threesome, which I suppose theoretically I should label as 'not safe for work' except that, basically, they look like a pile of rocks. I would like to point out that there were also a lot of misguided young ones who had trouble differentiating rocks from young lady crabs, which I suppose is an understandable mistake.

At any rate, as a California native, I have got to say, there is a lot of crazy stuff out here, but we don't have anything like this!