For countless years, horseshoe crabs have been managed by many states along the East Coast as just another commercial product, like used cars. 

Horseshoe crabs are now under great stress from both the biomedical industry and the bait industry that are triggering precipitous declines in their numbers, and reducing populations in breeding areas such as Delaware Bay in New Jersey and all over New York Harbor and the east coast. 

But many ecologists believe there is no longer an excuse for using horseshoe crabs, either for bait or as a source of medical materials. These fisheries – such as eel & whelk fishing – that use horseshoe crabs as bait are dwindling, and there are synthetic alternatives to using their blood for medical products. There’s no reason to be killing horseshoe crabs at all.

The most common injuries to horseshoe crabs are from the commercial fishing industry that uses trawls or a large net that is towed through the bottom of the water to harvest crabs for the biomedical industry. The hauling and the harsh movement of a large number of crabs into nets and large plastic bins can cause puncture wounds or dents and caved-in carapaces, or the loss of a telson by the mishandling of a horseshoe crab. 

While crabs for the bait industry are killed, crabs for the biomedical industry have nearly half of their blood taken from each animal, which renders a crab unable to spawn for that year and perhaps for the next year.

Horseshoe crabs are being killed and injured in vast numbers, and that is having severe ecological consequences not just for the crabs but for other creatures that depend on horseshoe crab eggs for their survival. 

For all these reasons and more, Save Coastal Wildlife along with several other environmental organizations have joined forces with our friends at the Center for Biological Diversity to urge NOAA Fisheries to list the Atlantic Horseshoe Crab as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. 

We need to move away from individual states trying to manage horseshoe crabs like used cars to a national policy of protection that will better safeguard these important keystone marine species from becoming extinct in the United States.