Of Crabs and Men

By Peter Stoler

BEAUTIFUL SWIMMERS by WILLIAM W. WARNER

304 pages. Atlantic-Little Brown.

$10.00.

Deep fried or steamed, the Atlantic blue crab is a gourmet's delight. William Warner's book about Callinectes sapidus (the creature's first name is Greek for beautiful swimmer, its last, Latin for tasty) is a reader's treat. Warner, a consultant to the Smithsonian Institution, has spent years studying the blue crab and his human harvesters in their natural habitat, Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. The result of his study is a piece of popular oceanography worthy of shelf space alongside Rachel Carson's classic Edge of the Sea and Henry Beston's Outermost House.

Warner, naturally enough, spends much of his book discussing the biology of the Chesapeake's fauna. Despite their feisty dispositions, crabs can also be considerate. Most marine creatures follow the love-them-and-leave-them tradition. But male blue crabs, or "jimmies," take good care of their mates. After car rying them in a soft embrace during the mating ritual, jimmies form protective cages around the "sooks," or mature females, as they shed their old shells and wait for new skeletons to form.

Liar's Bench. Warner is as attentive to the crabmen as he is to their catch.

The author's long hours spent on the water, hauling heavy "drudges" and sorting crabs as they scamper across a pitching deck have fostered a deep affection for the stoic, whimsical fisher folk. That feeling shines through Warner's retelling of Jaws-style crises spawned at "liar's bench" on the dock at Crisfield.

Md., crab capital of America. Warner is equally appreciative of his friends' boats, those eccentric skipjacks, scrapers, draketails and Jenkins Creekers found only on Chesapeake Bay.

The naturalist recognizes that the bay, its crabs and its watermen's way of life are endangered species. Warner does not attempt to change the situation by preaching. His text performs a far better service. In its unsentimental way, it evokes Shakespeare's phrase: "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." Callinectes sapidus and Homo sapiens may seem a world apart. Beautiful Swimmers shows how minuscule that world is--and how interrelated its in habitants have become.

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