Saving Seafood

Endangered species listing sought for horseshoe crabs

February 13, 2024 — Apetition filed Feb. 12 with NOAA Fisheries seeks federal Endangered Species Act protection for the American horseshoe crab, a long-ubiquitous species whose populations have  “crashed in recent decades because of overharvesting and habitat loss,” according to the Center for Biological Diversity.

The center and 22 other environmental groups from the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico states want regulators to restrict horseshoe crab harvests for commercial whelk and eel fisheries, and for crab blood used by biomedical companies.

“We’re wiping out one of the world’s oldest and toughest creatures,” said Will Harlan, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “These living fossils urgently need Endangered Species Act protection. Horseshoe crabs have saved countless human lives, and now we should return the favor.”

Horseshoe crabs come ashore in spring along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, laying their eggs in massive beach spawning events. One of the largest gatherings happens on Delaware Bay beaches, where the concentrations of crabs eggs attract migrating shorebirds including red knots.

But “horseshoe crab populations have declined by two-thirds in the Delaware Bay, their largest population stronghold,” according to the Center for Biological Diversity. Early alarms over declining crab and shorebird numbers led New Jersey officials to first restrict commercial crab harvests in the late 1990s.

Read the full article at the National Fisherman

Horseshoe crabs have roamed the planet for 450 million years, but they could be running out of time

August 26, 2023 —  One of the great delights of summer on the New England shore is catching sight in shallow waters of the humble horseshoe crab. Ancient and mysterious, these creatures are precious beyond their eerie beauty because their blood is essential to testing the safety of vaccines and medical equipment, and their nutrient-rich eggs provide food for endangered shorebirds such as the red knot.

But the horseshoe crab, surviving for at least 450 million years, is today imperiled by exploitation, both from commercial biomedical firms and from eel and whelk fishermen who use them for bait. Although scattered populations have rebounded, some — including the American horseshoe crab — are listed as endangered or vulnerable to extinction on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of threatened species.

Last month, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries issued new regulations for horseshoe crab harvesting, including the first biomedical quota of 200,000 crabs. The state also lowered the cap on harvesting for bait, to 140,000 crabs per season. Government wildlife managers seek to balance the needs of various constituencies, including commercial interests, against the conservation of critical species. But given their essential role both in human health and coastal biodiversity, you have to ask why the state allows the taking of any horseshoe crabs for bait.

Read the full article at the Boston Globe

Connecticut bans harvest of horseshoe crabs

August 14, 2023 — Connecticut has banned the harvesting of horseshoe crabs along its coastline amid concerns about the ecological health of the species, which is prized for its life-saving blue blood.

The ban, approved by the state Legislature, outlaws horseshoe crab hand harvesting beginning on Oct. 1. Anyone caught violating the law faces a $25 fine for each crab harvested. There are exemptions for scientific and medical purposes if it is determined that doing so will not harm the overall horseshoe crab population.

Gov. Ned Lamont, who signed the bill on Wednesday, said the number of horseshoe crabs in Long Island Sound and throughout the Atlantic Coast has been “severely depleted” in recent years, raising concerns that the species could go the way of the dinosaurs.

Read the full article at the Center Square

Blue blood from horseshoe crabs is needed for medicine, but a declining bird relies on crabs to eat

August 1, 2023  — A primordial sea animal that lives on the tidal mudflats of the East Coast and serves as a linchpin for the production of vital medicines stands to benefit from new protective standards.

But conservationists who have been trying for years to save a declining bird species — the red knot — that depends on horseshoe crabs fear the protections still don’t go far enough.

Drug and medical device makers are dependent on the valuable blue blood of the crabs — helmet-shaped invertebrates that have scuttled in the ocean and tidal pools for more than 400 million years — to test for potentially dangerous impurities. The animals are drained of some of their blood and returned to the environment, but many die from the bleeding.

Read the full article at Associated Press

MASSACHUSETTS: State sets bio-medical quota on horseshoe crabs

July 24, 2023 — They’re prized by the biomedical community for their life-saving blue blood, but the increasing demand for horseshoe crabs is raising concerns about the well-being of the prehistoric species, prompting state regulators to set new harvesting limits.

The Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries has rolled out new regulations for the state’s horseshoe crab fishery that include a first-ever biomedical harvest quota.

Under the regulations, the biomedical catch quota would be set at 200,000 horseshoe crabs annually, and will be divided evenly among the handful of Massachusetts companies that process their blood for biomedical research and drug development.

“Capping total horseshoe crab harvest and mortality is the single most important conservation measure the state can take this year,” DMF said in a statement on the new regulations. “This eliminates the potential for uncontrolled growth in the biomedical fishery which could negatively impact the resource moving forward.”

Read the full article at Salem News

Modern Problems for the Ancient Horseshoe Crab

July 16, 2023 — The horseshoe crab starts its extraordinary annual migration to the East End not in Manhattan but on the continental shelf, in the dark, under hundreds of feet of water. Some ancient instinct, strengthened over nearly 500 million years of life on earth, tells it to begin, and over the course of months it edges closer to our shoreline, until the waters become shallow and the crab’s days slowly brighten.

On a full moon tide in May, its journey is complete, and along the bottom of our bays, hundreds pair off. The smaller male attaches to the larger female, who finds a suitable beach to lay her eggs. She buries herself five to 10 centimeters into the sand and deposits upward of 10,000 eggs before the male fertilizes them.

“She drags him around. He’s sort of along for the ride,” said Matt Sclafani, who works for the Cornell Cooperative Extension, and runs the horseshoe crab monitoring network in New York on behalf of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “The female pumps the water with her gills to help increase the fertilization success.” Satellite males, unattached to the female, also can externally fertilize some of the eggs.

Read the full article at The East Hampton Star

Coastal biomedical labs are bleeding more horseshoe crabs with little accountability

June 13, 2023 — Horseshoe crabs used to be everywhere. Millions of years before dinosaurs roamed the planet, each spring, the hard-shelled creatures gathered to mate in massive mounds along the beaches of the Atlantic coast. Later, migratory shorebirds like the robin-size red knot learned to fly up from South America to join them for a feast. The crabs’ eggs gave the birds the energy they needed to keep flying north to breed in the Arctic.

But humans began to want something from the crabs, too — their blood. In the 1960s, scientists discovered that the sky blue blood inside horseshoe crabs would clot when it detected bacterial toxins. Vaccines, drugs and medical devices have to be sterile before they’re put inside people. A better toxin-detection system meant less contamination risk for patients, so fishermen soon started collecting and selling the prehistoric animals to be bled.

A synthetic alternative was later invented and has since been approved in Europe as an equivalent to the ingredient that requires horseshoe crabs. But in the U.S., the blood harvest isn’t shrinking. It’s growing. Five companies along the East Coast — with operations in South Carolina, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia and Maryland — drained over 700,000 crabs in 2021. That’s more than any other year since officials started keeping track in 2004. Since then, the number of crabs bled by the industry has more than doubled. At least 80 million tests are performed each year around the world using the blood-derived ingredient.

Read the full article at NPR

Fishing Regulator Rejects Lifting Ban on Female Crab Harvest

November 11, 2022 — A fisheries regulator on Thursday unexpectedly extended a ban on harvesting female horseshoe crabs from the Delaware Bay to help protect a vital food source for the red knot, a threatened shorebird that migrates via the bay’s beaches.

A board at the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission voted to maintain a decade-old zero-quota on female crabs at a closely watched meeting that set next year’s crab catch by the fishing industry in New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia.

The decision rejected a plan that would have allowed the industry to catch about 150,000 female crabs in 2023, the first proposed female harvest in 10 years.

The plan had been attacked by conservationists who argued that resuming the female harvest would further reduce food for the red knot and other migrating shorebirds that depend on the bay’s crab eggs to complete a long-distance flight each spring from South America to breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic.

Read the full article at the New York Times

A Planned Restart of a Crab Harvest Pits Conservation Against Industry

November 8, 2022 — For the first time in 10 years, a fisheries regulator is poised to restart the harvest of female horseshoe crabs in the Delaware Bay, a policy change that conservationists say will threaten the survival of the Atlantic species of the red knot, an imperiled shorebird.

On Nov. 10, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission will vote on whether to move toward lifting a ban on the female crab catch that had been imposed after overharvesting led to a severe decline in the populations of knots and other migratory shorebirds dependent on crab eggs as a critical food source.

Between 2003 and 2012, the population of female horseshoe crabs in the Delaware Bay was estimated at 3 million to 6 million, according to the commission. Since the ban took effect in 2013, the commission said, the bay’s female horseshoe crab population has rebounded to about 11.2 million.

Under the new proposal, the fishing industry across four bay states — New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia — would be allowed to catch a total of about 150,000 female crabs for bait next year. The fisheries commission contends that the quotas set would not threaten the crab population or the birds that feed on crab eggs. Quotas for the harvesting of 500,000 male crabs would stay the same next year.

In a new peer-reviewed paper, Larry Niles, a co-author and wildlife biologist who has monitored shorebird migration on the New Jersey side of the Delaware Bay for 26 years, reported that the density of horseshoe crab eggs on the bay’s beaches is only about one-tenth of what it was in the 1980s.

“A lack of recovery of horseshoe crab egg and shorebird abundance suggests that horseshoe crab harvest management has functioned to stabilize populations but has been inadequate to promote the recovery of horseshoe crab and shorebird populations, including the endangered red knot, to levels that existed prior to a wave of unregulated harvest,” the paper said.

Read the full article at the New York Times

 

They’re bleeding horseshoe crabs on the Cape and some advocates are worried

July 18, 2022 — Between the local dump and highway, in a nondescript building that lacks any indication of who occupies it, one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies recently began harvesting the milky-blue blood of an ancient creature plucked from the beaches and bays around Cape Cod.

Charles River Laboratories is one of just four companies in the United States — and now the second on the Cape — licensed to harvest the blood of horseshoe crabs for a valuable component that’s used to identify harmful bacteria during the testing of new drugs.

The bleeding of crabs, combined with their use as bait and losses to their coastal habitat, has led them to be listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which maintains the world’s most comprehensive list of threatened species. The group considers the crabs “endangered” in the Gulf of Maine and the Mid-Atlantic, areas that include Cape Cod, though officials in Massachusetts have cited surveys suggesting the region’s population has increased.

State officials also pointed to surveys done every spring for decades that show female horseshoe crabs at a near high in abundance. However, a similar state survey in the fall — which officials didn’t acknowledge until the Globe asked about it — shows the number of female crabs actually decreasing substantially over the past five years.

Since bled crabs are rarely tracked after they’re released, scientists and environmental advocates say it’s hard to know for sure how many crabs actually die, or are otherwise harmed, as a result of the bleeding, which drains large amounts of their blood.

Charles River officials told the Globe that just 4 percent of their crabs die before being returned to the wild; however, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources has estimated more than 20 percent of female crabs die within two weeks of being bled by the company.

Charles River officials have defended the additional pressure on the species, contending that the good from preventing the contamination of drugs outweighs the environmental impact. But there are now synthetic substitutes that rival companies say could reduce and eventually eliminate the need to rely on the crabs’ blood, which has been used for testing drugs since the 1970s.

One pharmaceutical giant that has received government permission for a synthetic alternative, Eli Lilly, has used its substitute to test COVID-19 antibody drugs.

Officials at Charles River said they’re developing their own synthetic versions but it would take years before they were ready and widely adopted.

“The synthetics we’ve tested are not sensitive enough to ensure patient safety,” Girshick said. “We’re actually pushing for a synthetic ourselves, and spending a lot of money to get there.”

Until then, she said, the company will be harvesting the blood from horseshoe crabs.

Read the full article from The Boston Globe