Imagine enduring on Earth for some hundreds of millions of years only to suddenly be catastrophically put upon by a beast more dangerous than any of the planetary extinction events you’ve survived. Such is the plight faced by one of the more mildly beloved survivors of the seas, horseshoe crabs, aka Limulus polyphemus. Now and again, I’ll call them Limulus.

What is currently befalling their 250-million-year existence is not a pretty sight, even in oft-ugly antediluvian terms.