Fate of the Horseshoe Crab
 Morgan McGivern
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(6/19/2008) Long before whelks, lobsters, and dinosaurs, there was one species — the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus. Four hundred and fifty-five million years ago these blue-blooded, walking helmets scuttled along the earth’s sandy shallows. Today, commercial fishermen want them as bait, biomedical companies extract their blood, and conservationists worry about their future.
Until 12 years ago, Richard and Colleen Rando, who live on Napeague Harbor, used to see thousands of molted carapaces strewn along the narrow beach. Mr. Rando recounted how the beach, during high tide, would be saturated with mating pairs of horseshoe crabs from May through July. In fact, yesterday’s full moon should have been perfect conditions for a horseshoe crab lovefest. However, these days, the shore is empty, Mr. Rando said.
Recently, Mr. Rando spotted a boat collecting the few mating pairs he could see. It reminded him of an incident he witnessed 20 years ago when he spotted a fisherman loading his truck with horseshoe crabs to be used as bait. Mr. Rando was disturbed by the event. “I can still visualize all the tails moving like crazy in the back of the pickup,” he said.
Among the remaining baymen, horseshoe crabs, often referred to as “horse feet,” are the preferred bait for lobster, eel, and whelk (a k a conch or winkles). Whelks are the large, local marine snails used to make the zesty, calamari-like Italian delicacy scungilli salad. When referring to the dish, Franceso Gardner of East Hampton’s Villa Italian Specialties said, “People come in just for it.” In an attempt to supply the high demand, the Villa orders approximately 14 pounds of whelk meat each week. This week, they ran out.
What makes horseshoe crabs so attractive to the creatures we like to eat? Nobody knows. Yet one thing is clear — the fishermen have seen that without the crabs, catch yields are much lower.
“Fishermen have tried everything — from chicken carcasses to dirty socks. Horseshoe crabs are what catch the eel and conch most effectively. They are the key ingredient,” said Brad Spear, the horseshoe crab management plan coordinator for the Mid-Atlantic Marine Fisheries Management Council.
In several states, a conflict has erupted between commercial fishermen who use them as bait and conservationists who are concerned about their role in the intertidal ecosystem.
John T. Tanacredi, the chairman of earth and marine sciences at Dowling College and a horseshoe crab expert, explained that horseshoe crab protein-rich eggs feed various shore-wading birds, including the threatened red knot on its migration each year from Argentina to Alaska. The birds refuel at Delaware Bay, where thousands of mating horseshoe crabs lay millions of eggs.
Commercial fishermen on the Delaware Bay collected the horseshoe crab for bait, which resulted in fewer eggs for the red knots to eat. As a result, the bird species began to decline. The state of Delaware responded with a moratorium on collecting female horseshoe crabs and New Jersey banned harvesting all together.
New York had maintained much looser restrictions, which allowed commercial fishermen to begin exporting horseshoe crabs to the mid-Atlantic states for use as bait, netting the New York fishermen at least $1 per crab.
Because of the increased demand, the overall annual crab-harvesting quota was “gobbled up quickly,” according to Mr. Spear. Therefore, during the harvesting seasons the daily limit of crabs caught per fisherman was reduced from 500 to 200. On June 5, the regulation became tighter, setting a maximum of 100 crabs per day. Beginning tomorrow, the daily limit will decrease even further to 30 crabs per fisherman per day.
Although the daily restrictions are smaller, Mr. Spear said that the overall annual harvesting quota has not decreased much. This year it is 170,000 crabs. The new plan has changed the rate of collection over time so that the harvesting will become more evenly distributed, and Mr. Spears hopes it will relieve the pressure on crab populations in New York waters.
Although reluctant to enter the debate, Mitchell Lester, a bayman who lives in Springs, said in a phone message, “We are a thing of the past. There are no more commercial fishermen. We’re just so regulated, we’re giving up.”
The horseshoe crab’s bluish, syrupy blood has become an essential commodity in the health care field. In the 1950s, Frederick Bang, a hematologist at Johns Hopkins University, discovered that the blood cells of horseshoe crabs contained a clotting factor that attaches to dangerous bacterial endotoxins and acts as a detection system for bacterial contamination. It is now used to uncover contamination in medical equipment such as syringes, pacemakers, and other implantation devices.
According to Mr. Spear, biomedical companies along the East Coast harvest the crabs, transport them to biomedical facilities in climate-controlled trucks, extract one-third of their blood, and then return them to the wild. For conservationists, at least the biomed companies are not killing the horseshoe crabs as the fishermen are.
Carl LoBue, a marine reserve specialist for the Nature Conservancy, said that another danger to the species was bulkheading. The retaining walls put up to prevent erosion of the shoreline act as a physical barrier that prevent the horseshoe crabs from entering potential spawning grounds.
Although bulkheading may be a real threat to the crabs, several marine scientists are more concerned with the impact of harvesting. Carl Safina, an author, marine biologist, and conservationist who lives in Amagansett, stumbled upon a horseshoe crab spawning event 20 years ago. “It was a very wild scene that wasn’t human-dominated. I felt the ancientness. It was the rite of the crabs.”
Recently, while observing another spawning scene, he was disturbed to see two men in trucks “wrenching off the animals as they attempted to nest.” Dr. Safina saw the men’s behavior as both irrational and wrong. “It seems utterly screwy to take animals with such high importance to human health,” he said.
Mitchell Lester, the bayman, said that he was done talking to the press. “Nobody else is in the business anymore,” he said in his message, referring to the state of commercial fishing.
Charlotte Klein Sasso of Stuart’s Seafood Market in Amagansett agreed, “The fishermen are in a precarious position for their survival both culturally and economically.”
But for Dr. Safina, the horseshoe crab’s future was of the utmost importance. “You don’t want to see that the world is dying,” he said. “You don’t want to see things being destroyed.”