Metro

Giant horseshoe crab orgy takes over New Jersey beach

This Jersey Shore party’s too wild even for Snooki.

Thousands of amorous horseshoe crabs have arrived at a Garden State beach for their giant, annual orgy, which the ancient creatures have been going to for eons, according to a report.

Sunray Beach on the Delaware Bay is to horseshoe crabs what Seaside Heights is to “Guidos”, as a throng of the carefree and hedonistic crabs gather for wild sex romps that involve as many as 13 males piling onto a female crab to fertilize her eggs, NJ.com reported.

“This beach is much more their home turf than it is ours,” Adrianna Zito-Livingston, coastal project coordinator for the Nature Conservancy’s New Jersey chapter, the outlet reported.

During the spring and early summer, the horseshoe crabs — who have been around for 400 million years and are not true crabs — slowly crawl ashore from the continental shelf so the female ones can lay their eggs, NJ.com reported.

Horseshoe crabs on a boat.
Horseshoe crabs are fornicating at an epic rate in the Garden State. LightRocket via Getty Images

The crabs wait for the high tide under the light of the full moon to begin their trysts.

“They need water to be able to reproduce so they need the sand where they’re spawning to be wet but not so wet so often that the tide is actually digging up their nests and moving the eggs,” Zito-Livingston told the outlet.

A horseshoe crab lying on the sand.
Female horseshoe crabs lay in a single sitting as many as 4,000 tiny green eggs, and between 12,000 to 24,000 in a spawning cycle. REDA&CO/Universal Images Group v

The female crabs lay in a single sitting as many as 4,000 tiny green eggs, and between 12,000 to 24,000 in a spawning cycle — attracting many potential mates in the process.

“Every nest is going to have up to 13 or 14 potential fathers,” Zito-Livingston said.

The beach often attracts curious spectators, who want to catch a glimpse of the “giant crab orgy,” the outlet reported.

“We have the largest spawning population of horseshoe crabs here in the Delaware Bay, so it’s a phenomenon worth checking out,” Zito-Livingston said.