CT’s ‘living fossils,’ on the road to extinction, get fighting chance with new harvesting ban

Predating dinosaurs, the horseshoe crab has roamed the earth for 445 million years, surviving five mass extinctions and three ice ages, but overfishing and habitat loss pose the greatest challenge yet to the survival of Long Island Sound’s “living fossils.”

A new state ban on horseshoe crab harvests aims to turn the keystone species’ declining numbers around.

On Wednesday, state leaders and environmental advocates gathered at Short Beach in Stratford to watch Gov. Ned Lamont sign the legislation that imposes a $25 fine for each horseshoe crab taken in violation of the ban starting Oct. 1.

“I think we realize more than ever that you can’t take this for granted and we have to pay special attention to this ecosystem that supports our lifestyle,” Lamont said. “Horseshoe crabs are pretty hardy … they can survive just about everything except for perhaps manmade harvesting and that is what’s going on that could potentially render them extinct.”

“They may not be the prettiest creatures in the world, these crustaceans, but they are important,” Lamont said.

Contrary to popular belief, and the governor’s comment, horseshoe crabs are actually not crustaceans — their closest living relatives are not the crabs with which they share a name, but spiders, ticks and scorpions. Only four horseshoe crab species exist today and the Atlantic horseshoe crab, known scientifically as Limulus polyphemus, is vulnerable to global extinction.

Connecticut’s horseshoe crab population has deteriorated since the early 2000s, their stock status sinking from “good” to “neutral” to “poor” in surveys conducted by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission between 2009 and 2019 in the New York Region. In 2022 researchers from Sacred Heart University labeled Long Island Sounds’ horseshoe crab as “functionally extinct.”

Scientists place the blame on climate change, habitat erosion and human encroachment, but the chief culprit is overharvest in the fishing industry, where horseshoe crabs become bait for eels and whelk.

State Rep. Joe Gresko, who spearheaded passage of the bill in the legislature, said that when viable bait alternatives like invasive crabs exist, “It’s not smart to harvest a species into extinction.”

“The signing of this bill is one definite step in the right direction,” Gresko said. “I’m hopeful this legislation will inspire our other neighboring states along the Atlantic seaboard. … If we just leave our friends be, we have millions of years of evidence to show that they will be able to repopulate the Atlantic and Long Island Sound.”

According to the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection, hand harvest permittees caught 17,984 horseshoe crabs in Connecticut in 2021. The following year, DEEP imposed restrictions with reduced daily possession limits and a “lunar closure” that paused the harvest during peak breeding times. Those regulations saw horseshoe crab captures fall to 1,343 crabs in 2022, DEEP said.

Priscilla Feral, president of Friends of Animals, a nonprofit that helped draft the new law, said that she is hopeful the total ban on horseshoe crab harvesting will give the population a fighting chance to recover.

“There are 15 anglers that had licenses to capture horseshoe crabs. Those 15 are not getting licenses anymore. They won’t have permits. They won’t have motivation — that sets the stride for what should happen,” Feral said.

New Jersey implemented its own ban in 2008 and other harvesting restrictions are in place in Delaware and South Carolina. Feral said the next step is to “complete the picture for Long Island Sound” and get New York on board.

“We’re working with New York legislators to get it done in New York, too. It’s going to be tougher there. We know they’re already nervous about the progress, but Connecticut leads the nation and I think it’s critically important for the birds, for the crabs, and for humanity,” Feral said.

Female horseshoe crabs spawn thousands of eggs into the sand, releasing as many as 88,000 each mating season. These eggs are a vital food source for shore birds, particularly the red knot, a threatened species that feeds on the eggs during their 9,000-mile-long spring migration. The red knots’ numbers have declined alongside horseshoe crabs. Other wildlife, such as sea turtles and anemones, feed on horseshoe crab larvae. Mollusks, seaweed, barnacles and other tiny sea creatures also make adult crab shells their home.

A flock of shorebirds including red knots (center) and ruddy turnstones (left) forage along the Delaware Bay shoreline in search of horseshoe crab eggs.In addition to its ecological importance, horseshoe crabs also play an indispensable role in modern medicine.

Horseshoe crabs have a distinct blue blood that is incredibly sensitive to endotoxins – substances produced by dangerous bacteria. In the 1950s, a scientist discovered that horseshoe crab blood coagulates in the presence of endotoxins, trapping the bacteria in a clump to protect the horseshoe crab from infection.

The compound responsible for the reaction, limulus amebocyte lysate, is the standard test for bacterial contamination screenings. The FDA requires that every drug, vaccine and surgical implant undergo an LAL test before certification.

LAL is a multimillion-dollar industry within biomedicine. Some analysts report the cost of blue blood at $60,000 a gallon. But blood harvesting requires hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs each year, and while the crabs are released afterward, a fraction die in the process.

DEEP Deputy Commissioner Mason Trumble said that the ban does include a carve-out that allows DEEP to issue hand harvesting permits for educational or scientific purposes. However, he said there are currently no medical permittees in Connecticut and that scientific permits typically involve small-scale harvesting touch tanks. Under the new law, DEEP can only issue a permit if the commissioner determines it will not harm the state’s horseshoe crab population.

“Our mission at DEEP is pretty simple related to wildlife — it’s to conserve and preserve our native species, horseshoe crabs obviously being one of those and an important part of those,” Trumble said. “There’s really two ways to do that.”

“The first one, probably the most important one, is habitat. Having spaces like living shorelines, undeveloped shorelines where animals can live,” Trumble added. “The second part of it is to manage and protect those species within their own environments, and that’s what the law today is all about, protecting horseshoe crabs. … We see changes as climate change comes into Long Island Sound. We see some species leaving. We see an increase in other species. … (Horseshoe crabs are) not the cutest or the cuddliest, but it’s certainly an important part of the ecosystem.”

Annie Hornish, the Connecticut state director of the Humane Society of the United States, said the true value of the horseshoe crab harvesting ban is its preservation of the species and greater biodiversity.

“We’re all interconnected in this web of life, and when one species is imperiled, it has a trigger effect on many other species,” Hornish said “This is going to help allow them to recoup their numbers and get back to a more sustainable level. The value of it is in biodiversity. It benefits all of us.”

DEEP instructs anyone who suspects or witnesses an illegal horseshoe crab harvesting should report incidents to the State Environmental Conservation Police at 860-424-3333. If you come across a horseshoe crab stranded in the sand, gently lift the crab by the sides of its shell and place it back in the water.