Before the end of the year, Gov. Kathy Hochul will decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs, as well as multitudes of other life forms that depend on them. From endangered red knots and other shorebirds to fish and sea turtles, horseshoe crab eggs and juveniles are an essential part of the natural food web — as they have been in a lineage that dates back 480 million years. Unfortunately, horseshoe crabs are also used as bait, chopped up and put into mesh bags to attract whelks and eels in a minuscule and harmful fishery, given what we know now about the risks for the species itself and its keystone place in the coastal environment. A bill that would eliminate harvesting horseshoe crabs was approved by the State Legislature. It awaits the governor’s decision.
For Ms. Hochul, signing it into law should be a no-brainer. New Jersey has had a ban in place for close to 20 years. Connecticut eliminated taking the crabs in 2023. South Carolina and Massachusetts have imposed partial bans. Delaware stopped harvesting female crabs in 2005; a restricted take of male crabs has continued in that state, as well as in Maryland and Virginia, allowing up to 500,000 to be removed each year. As a result, the crabs have more than doubled in Delaware Bay, surveys conducted yearly since 1999 show, indicating that harvest reductions work. At the federal level, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission classified New York’s horseshoe crab population as “poor.” The current bill would prohibit taking them for commercial or biomedical purposes with exceptions for scientific research and education, for example, nonprofits or public aquariums.
In rejecting a nearly identical bill last year, the governor said that this kind of species-specific regulation was the job of the State Department of Environmental Conservation, not lawmakers. But the D.E.C. is stretched too thin, with too broad a mission to be an effective steward of all things natural. Despite seeming like a bureaucratic monolith from the outside, the agency’s Marine Division for this region is actually just a few people in a room somewhere UpIsland. In this case, the agency’s failure to impose restrictions means that legislators have had to act.
Horseshoe crabs’ ecological importance is indisputable. The effects of a ban on what is truthfully a tiny part of the state’s commercially important fishing industry, in which a handful of trappers do a disproportionate harm to the species, is vastly outweighed by its benefits. Before the next breeding season, when the crabs scuttle ashore in late spring and early summer to mate and lay eggs, Ms. Hochul should sign their permanent protection into law.