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By Karl Grossman - August 4, 2024
“We are destroying this incredible living fossil, chopping it up for bait,” New York State Assembly Member Deborah J. Glick told me in an interview last week.
She is the author of a bill in the State Assembly which with a companion measure in the State Senate has passed that would protect horseshoe crabs. They would prohibit horseshoe crabs from being taken from the waters of New York State except for educational and research purposes.
The legislation is now before Governor Kathy Hochul to sign or veto.
In a letter to the governor, Glick, a Manhattan resident with a Suffolk County connection—she spent several years renting on Fire Island, the shore of which is among the habitats for horseshoe crabs—wrote: “Horseshoe crabs have existed for over 400 million years. Commonly referred to as living fossils, these marine creatures predate the earliest dinosaurs by hundreds of millions of years. Their long existence on our planet has led them to be a keystone species of which many other marine and avian species rely on for their continued survival.”
“Unfortunately,” wrote Glick, “humanity’s exploitation of this prehistoric species has threatened to end horseshoe crabs’ 400-million-year existence.”
Environmentalists in Suffolk County are enthusiastically backing the legislation and so is a global expert on horseshoe crabs, John Tanacredi of Huntington, professor of Earth and Environmental Studies at Molloy University and the director of its Center for Environmental Research and Coastal Oceans Monitoring located in West Sayville. Tanacredi has extensively studied horseshoe crabs for many decades.
The ban “needs to be done,” Tanacredi said.
Tancredi points out that horseshoe crabs aren’t all over the U.S. but are limited to the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Florida. Locally, they are found in the wetlands and along the coastlines of Long Island. But, Tancredi warned in a presentation to the group Long Island Metro Business Action in 2021, they could now be “on the cusp” of local “extinction.”
An estimated 150,000 horseshoe crabs are taken every year from New York waters —mainly for bait to catch whelk or conk and eel, Tanacredi said.
Horseshoe crabs, which are more closely related to spiders and scorpions than other crabs, are an important part of the ecosystem and have survived five mass extinction events, but their population in Long Island Sound, where they live year-round, has been declining for the past 20 years, according to the Long Island Sound Study. Threats to horseshoe crabs include: overharvesting for bait, habitat loss and degradation, pollution, bycatch in abandoned nets and lobster traps, and motorized vehicles on beaches.”
The Seatuck Environmental Association, based in Islip, also wrote to Hochul to express “the organization’s strong support” for the “horseshoe crab protection measure” and “urge you to sign the legislation into law. If done, this beleaguered species, of which approximately 3.5 million have been killed in New York State over the past quarter-century for use as bait in the eel and whelk fisheries, will finally receive the protection it deserves.”
“As a result of this huge take, horseshoe crabs have declined precipitously in New York coastal waters, most notably at numerous sites around Long Island. Many Long Islanders have noted the significant decline in horseshoe crab populations, recalling when the species was abundant in New York coastal waters decades ago,” the association wrote in a letter signed by its Executive Director Enrico Nardone and John Turner, Seatuck’s senior conservation policy advocate, “
The letter says the State Department of Environmental Conservation “has set annual harvest quotas for the crabs at 150,000 animals and has implemented a few other measures in an effort to conserve horseshoe crab populations….Unfortunately, these strategies have failed to reverse the loss.”
“We understand there is opposition to the legislation from the Long Island Farm Bureau, representing baymen, and several companies that ‘bleed’ horseshoe crabs for the production of Limulus Ameboxyte Lysate (LAL), which is used to detect…bacteria on surgical equipment and implants. We believe their opposition is unjustified,” Seatuck wrote.
Regarding bait, “there are other baits and bait formulations that have proven effective in catching both whelk and eel,” the letter continued.
And, “there are synthetic alternatives to LAL that negate the need for companies” to “bleed” horseshoe crabs, it said. “A new laboratory manufactured product, recombinant rFC [scientific shorthand for recombinant Factor C] is an alternative to LAL and has proven to be as effective and in some cases more effective than LAL. Not surprisingly given its effectiveness, rFC has been approved for use in Europe, where it is displacing LAL. In the United States, the U.S. Pharmacopeia is very likely to approve the use of rFC in the United States later this summer,” said Seatuck.
Seatuck is asking people to write to Hochul asking her to sign the legislation.
It has posted an “Action Alert” on its website urging New Yorkers to help “ensure New York seizes a historic opportunity to safeguard horseshoe crab populations.”
“Please take a moment to urge Governor Hochul to enact this important measure,” it says, and lists the phone number of the governor’s office, 518-474-8390, the link to the governor’s contact form where a message can be submitted and suggests, too, “mailing her a letter or postcard.”
Adrienne Esposito, executive director of a leading environmental organization here, Citizens Campaign for the Environment, says: “We have been depleting the species for decades and it is time to stop. We are incredibly excited that horseshoe crabs will finally have needed critical protections in New York State so its populations can rebound.”
