Rewilding the Sea - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 232

washed up in crisp pink drifts sometimes a mile or two long, a last gift
to the earthlings as they lumbered back into the deeps.
Older people I know, who have lived on this coast since they were
children, told me that the spider crabs started arriving in large num-
bers only fifteen or twenty years ago. 'It's an invasion,' said the man
who runs the tackle shop in Llansglodion. Some people assumed that
they were moving north as the sea warmed. This is possible, as the
species is limited by temperature: the hard winter of 1962-3 wiped
out the spider crabs from the south-east of England. Others suggested
that the disappearance of fish, which eat and compete with crabs, has
allowed their population to explode. Something like this happened on
the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, where crabs and lobsters prolif-
erated after the cod were fished out.
Whatever the explanation may be, this migration is a reminder of a
natural abundance that was once universal. I have seen spider crabs
described as 'the wildebeest of our waters', 1 but there is, or was, noth-
ing remarkable about their numbers. Almost every ecosystem - whether
on land or sea - once resembled the Serengeti: great herds of animals,
coming and going in prodigious migrations. The state of nature is a
state of almost inconceivable abundance.
In his magniicent but sadly neglected topic The Unnatural History
of the Sea , Professor Callum Roberts recalls the herring migrations
that once stormed the coasts of Britain. 2 Some shoals, he estimates,
'could block the light from 20 or even 40 square kilometres of sea-
bed'. He quotes Oliver Goldsmith who, in 1776, described the arrival
of a typical body of herring 'divided into distinct columns, of five or
six miles in length, and three or four broad; while the water before
them curls up, as if forced out of its bed . . . the whole water seems
alive; and is seen so black with them to a great distance, that the num-
ber seems inexhaustible'. 3
Goldsmith noted how these shoals were harried by swarms of dol-
phins, sharks, in and sperm whales, in British waters, within sight of
the shore. The herring were followed by bluefin and longfin tuna,
blue, porbeagle, thresher, mako and occasional great white sharks, as
well as innumerable cod, spurdog, tope and smoothhound. On some
parts of the seabed the eggs of the herring lay six feet deep.
Even within the past century such monsters as pursued those shoals