IT’S NOT EASY BEING A HORSESHOE CRAB AROUND NEW YORK HARBOR!
Video by Gavin Shwahla: www.gavinwild.com
THESE PREHISTORIC ANIMALS, WHICH ARE OVER 400 MILLION YEARS OLD, NEED YOUR HELP IF THEY ARE GOING TO SURVIVE THE HUMAN OR ANTHROPOCENE ERA, ESPECIALLY AROUND NEW YORK HARBOR!
PLEASE DO NOT LET THEM DISAPPEAR!
New York Harbor including Raritan Bay, Sandy Hook Bay, and Jamaica Bay.
Although the largest population of spawning Horseshoe crabs in the United States can be found in Delaware Bay, the busy and bustling waters of New York Harbor (including Raritan Bay, Sandy Hook Bay, and Jamaica Bay) have a population of crabs too. Around New York Harbor, few people welcome these incredible ancient mariners, as people do in Delaware Bay. Some people consider these ancient creatures weird and possibly dangerous with long pointed tails. Some fishermen consider them an annoyance, as something that eats bait. Commercial fishermen in New York State consider them profit, something to be sold as bait. Horseshoe crabs can be bait to catch American eels and whelks or conchs that are often exported to fish markets in Europe and Asia.
Volunteers with Save Coastal Wildlife Nonprofit have been monitoring Horseshoe crab populations along the southern shore of New York Harbor in Monmouth County, New Jersey since 2009. The goal of the study has been to obtain a better idea of the spawning population of this aquatic species, and to ascertain if the population is stable, increasing, or decreasing.
So far, results of the study shows a population of Horseshoe crabs that are less than robust. The female population is weak and in decline due to the commercial harvest of horseshoe crabs in New York State for bait.
Horseshoe crabs harvested for bait or blood.
Female Horseshoe Crabs are in Decline around
New York Harbor!
What could be causing a decline in females horseshoe crabs around New York Harbor?
Increased harvesting of Horseshoe crabs, especially females, in New York State threatens their population. Female Horseshoe crabs are about thirty percent bigger than males, thus they have more mass. Adult females also often carry eggs, which help to create better bait.
A 2019 Horseshoe Crab Benchmark Stock Assessment by The Atlantic State Marine Fisheries Commission evaluated the stock status of horseshoe crabs by region, finding the status of the New York region population has trended downward from good, to neutral, and now to poor. The Benchmark Assessment was endorsed by the Peer Review Panel and accepted by the Horseshoe Crab Management Board for management use. “Poor” status was >66% of surveys meeting this criterion.
New York State is currently only one of handful states along the Atlantic Coast of the United States that has not placed any type of moratorium or restrictions on harvesting Horseshoe crabs during their important breeding or mating period in May & June.
Be a hero! You can help a horseshoe crab every spring by flipping over a stranded crab. If a stranded horseshoe crab can be flipped back over before the heat of the day and make its way back to the water it may be able to survive another stressful breeding season.
In Massachusetts, concerns about a dwindling horseshoe crab population has led to stricter fishery regulations and even closures of certain areas to harvest. Harvesting horseshoe crabs within the Cape Cod National Seashore boundary is prohibited. In Maine, the state tightened its fishing regulations in 2004 to close the horseshoe crab season from May 1 to Oct. 30, a period that includes the mid-May to mid-June breeding season. New Hampshire, Maryland, and Virginia have initiated or proposed more restrictive harvest regulations for Horseshoe crabs. South Carolina has prohibited harvest except for the biomedical industry since 1991.
Since 2008, New Jersey has had an outright moratorium on all horseshoe crab harvests.In Delaware there is a moratorium from Jan. 1 to June 7, but prohibits harvesting female crabs year-round.
But concern for dwindling horseshoe crabs in New York’s tidal waters does not seem to be a concern at all with state government officials in New York State either in the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation or the New York State Assembly or the New York State Senate.
Image from Cape Gazette. Similar to what happens in the tidal water of New York State, a commercial fishermen off the coast of Delaware is chopping up horseshoe crabs in half because they are the favored bait for “conching” or catching whelks for market. The difference between New York & Delaware is that female horseshoe crabs are fully protected from “conching” in Delaware.
Since 2009, New York State’s commercial quota for horseshoe crabs has been around 150,000 crabs, with a certain amount of these captured crabs coming from Raritan Bay and along the south shore of Long Island.
But there are also an undetermined amount of crabs in New York State being harvested illegally. In May 2013 two men from Brooklyn were arrested for stealing 200 horseshoe crabs from an island, locally known as the Ruffle Bar, in Jamaica Bay, Queens. The two men were each charged with taking wildlife without a permit and disturbing wildlife breeding practices in a national park.
More recently, a woman was arrested on an island in Jamaica Bay for illegally harvesting seven Horseshoe crabs on April 30, 2017. The women told Officers with the United States Park Police that she was harvesting crabs for her business. The body parts of Horseshoe crabs in some parts of the world are considered to be an aphrodisiac for men and can command a high price.
Typically, horseshoe crabs are harvested as bait for the American eel and Channel whelk fisheries. Fishermen will use the body parts of female Horseshoe crabs as bait to attract eels and whelks, locally known as conch.
Eels and whelks are highly valued in Asia and Europe for human consumption. Harvesters in the United States have turned to the American eel and Channel whelk fisheries to make money and meet the diverse needs for seafood in oversea markets.
It's a global economy and our Horseshoe crabs in New York Harbor and along Long Island are often seen as bait and profit. In about 20 years, the price for a single horseshoe crab has jumped from .25 cents to more than $5.00 per crab.
In addition to bait, Horseshoe crabs are harvested by the medical industry for their cooper based blood, which turns blue when exposed to air. Horseshoe crab blood has remarkable antibacterial properties and enormous medical value that makes certain no impurities exist in medicines. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requires all intravenous drugs and vaccines, and any medical device, such as replacement hips, hearts, pacemakers or knees, coming in contact with the human body to be first tested through the crab's blood for bacterial toxins, such as toxic shock syndrome, meningitis, and typhoid. As a result, millions of people survive each year in the United States due to the clotting characteristics of the Horseshoe crab’s blue blood.
While New Jersey has a total ban on harvesting horseshoe crabs in all state estuarine waters, New York State does not even limit the harvest of horseshoe crabs during their brief mating season in May and June.
Unfortunately, the medical benefit for humans is not always a benefit for the crabs. Horseshoe crabs are supposed to be caught, bled (about 30% of the blood from each crab is taken), and then returned to waters where they were found, but not all make it. According to author Alexis Madrigal in a February 26, 2014 article in The Atlantic entitled, The Blood Harvest, “between 10 and 30 percent of the bled animals, according to varying estimates, actually die.” In addition, “bleeding a female Horseshoe crab may make it less likely to mate, even if it doesn't kill it.”
Author Barclay Ballard in a June 7, 2019 article in The New Economy tells us that; “From 2004 to 2017 along the US Atlantic coast, an average of approximately 417,700 crabs were harvested and bled annually by the biomedical industry,” ASMFC staff told The New Economy. “A few crabs do die at the facility and are reported to the ASMFC. After crabs are bled, they are returned alive to the water and the ASMFC applies a 15 percent mortality rate to those and adds them to those that died during the collection and time at the facility. Therefore, the ASMFC believes that on average, from 2004 and 2017, approximately 61,500 horseshoe crabs died annually from biomedical practices along the Atlantic coast of the US.” But the number of dead horseshoe crabs is probably being under-reported and most certainly a lot higher.
The article in The New Economy goes on to explain that “a 2014 study by researchers at the University of New Hampshire and Plymouth State University found that the bleeding process results in lower activity levels and a decreased expression of tidal rhythms. While it is true that further study is required, the data available does suggest the horseshoe crabs that survive bleeding are left disorientated and weak, potentially affecting the ability of female crabs to spawn. Further research has found that the mortality rate of horseshoe crabs post-bleeding is only eight percent for males, but as high as 30 percent for females.”
On Saturday, June 15, 2019, volunteers with Save Coastal Wildlife found a male horseshoe crab entangled in fishing line along Raritan Bay, NJ.
Environmental scientists, John Tanacredi and Sixto Portilla, also tell us from a technical research paper published in Changing Global Perspectives on Horseshoe Crab Biology, Conservation and Management, 2015, that many crabs taken from New York waters to be bled by the medical industry are often not returned to New York. From research on Horseshoe crab populations from Brooklyn to Montauk from 2003 to 2014, they found that numerous crabs permitted by the State of New York to be harvested and taken to Massachusetts to be bled for the medical industry are often released “to local waters in Cape Cod, not back in NYS waters as required” by their permit. In the end, “many of those animals are re-harvested for bait and sold back to NYS fishermen at an average cost of US $5/crab.”
With all this legal and illegal action, it is no wonder the harvesting of Horseshoe crabs, especially females, has had a negative impact. It has limited the distribution and breeding of the crabs, resulting in localized population declines. It’s not an easy life in New York Harbor, and the Horseshoe crab population could locally disappear if nothing is done to safeguard the species in New York State waters.
A Horseshoe Crab sign in Great Kills Park on Staten Island, New York City.
New Jersey has instituted a moratorium on harvesting Horseshoe Crabs in 2007, but there is no such law in New York State. People are still able to harvest crabs. This action puts the crab population under severe threat in Lower New York Bay, Raritan Bay and Sandy Hook Bay.
The loss of a robust Horseshoe crab population around New York Harbor has had a disastrous impact to migratory shorebirds. The fatty eggs of Horseshoe crabs once provided an important food source for many migratory shorebirds, including red knots, ruddy turnstones, and sanderlings, as they make their journey northward to breed in the Arctic. If the population of Horseshoe crabs disappears in New York Harbor it could result in even a greater loss of these migratory animals, or lead some other animals to starve.
Hopefully, with greater awareness and public support, coupled with increased conservation efforts, Horseshoe crabs, the ancient mariners of New York Harbor, will once again fill beaches for many spring seasons to come.
Horseshoe Crabs Are Also Under Threat in Nearby Long Island Sound Too!
The Horseshoe Crab population is also not doing well around Long Island Sound. Population monitoring data collected by researchers and citizen scientists, including tagging and spawning counts by Project Limulus based at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut show the numbers of horseshoe crabs in Long Island Sound have steadily declined over the past 20 years. Although American horseshoe crab populations increased in the 1990s, recent years show a declining trend due to various stressors including over-harvesting, illegal harvesting, habitat loss, bycatch in abandoned “ghost nets” and lobster traps, and motorized vehicles on beaches. These many threats provide a great risk to the continued existence of Horseshoe crabs around Long Island Sound.
Dr. Jennifer Mattei, founder of Project Limulus, reports that the number of pairs of horseshoe crabs coming up to lay eggs on Connecticut tidal beaches is in decline and the number of females coming up alone, without a mate is increasing. In Long Island Sound, males are finding it difficult to find females because of their scarcity.
