Envoys of crab courage

CUE UP the "Jaws" theme music for the horseshoe crab. That was the terror Julio Vargas, Erik Michel, and Alex Mendez once held for the tank-like prehistoric creature.

"When I was a little kid, I always thought it would be cool to work at the Aquarium," said Michel, 18, a spring graduate of the Parkway Academy of Technology and Health. "But when they brought out the tank and they asked me to hold the horseshoe crab, I was petrified."

Mendez, 17, a student at City on a Hill, said, "When they told me I had to touch a horseshoe crab, I said, 'Oh, man!' "

Vargas, their 31-year-old supervisor, said, "The first time they asked me to touch one, I said, 'No, no, no! Is it going to hurt?' "

They all have become urban horseshoe ambassadors, coaxing thousands of youths in Boston to find the courage to touch one. Last week ended a six-year stint by Vargas in community outreach at the New England Aquarium. He is returning to Hampshire College, which he left when money ran out. After many dead-end jobs, his outgoing personality and camp counseling experience for Action for Boston Community Development landed him his job at the Aquarium.

Accompanied by interns such as Mendez and Michel, who will be attending Long Island University-Brooklyn Campus, they took a touch tank to youths at community centers, churches, libraries, and after-school programs.

They gave Boston area youth their first live encounter with a lobster, a scallop, a sea urchin, a spider crab, a hermit crab, or, of course, a horseshoe crab. As divorced from nature as American youth are in general, Vargas, Michel, and Mendez, who all describe themselves as African-American and Latino, say the problem is acute for urban youth of color, despite living close to Boston Harbor. The Aquarium says their program reaches 12,000 youth a year.

Vargas, a native of East Boston, said part of his inspiration is knowing that the first images many children have of sea creatures is SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick the starfish.

He remembers watching his 3-year-old nephew smack his 4-year-old nephew just seconds after seeing the characters do it in the cartoon.

"In my first year, I was at a church in Four Corners [Dorchester] and the first time I went, I asked, 'How many of you have ever been to the beach?' " Vargas said.

"Two kids out of 35 raised their hands. I said to myself, 'Wow. This is what we need to do.' In the places we've gone back to year after year, we don't see that anymore.

"We've gotten to the point where we now go in and talk about invasive species. At first, they don't think they have anything to do with it. We ask them to look at the tags on their shirts and the labels on their video games.

"They realize that everything they have gets here by plane and boat. They realize that their Game Boy might have brought in an invasive species. We had one little kid who came up to us and said, 'I told my mom not to buy anything else unless she picks it up by car.' "

Sometimes the creatures do scare children, as when a scallop gushed water in a girl's face. Vargas calmed her down by letting the scallop jet some more water on his face. In time, the most scared people are the parents when they pick up their children. One father panicked while holding a horseshoe crab and threw it across the room. Mendez caught it before it was smashed.

Vargas said, "When I'm doing this, I'm not really thinking about whether we're helping produce the next scientists.

"By us being there, we open up a part of a kid to just being open." He talked about when he first attended Hampshire College, he was "definitely not comfortable with sheep and cows. I couldn't stand the smell and it was so quiet out there, I thought Freddy [horror-film Krueger] was going to get me. Now, I don't even miss the city. Now, I can't wait to get out and see the stars."

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.