Red Knots are Red, Horseshoe Crab’s Blood is Blue,

Extinction can be Stopped, but it’s All up to You.

By Louis Mason

What do fertilizer, eel bait, food for shore birds, and bacterial tests all have in common?

If you knew that they were all things made from parts of a horseshoe crab, you might need to get

out more, but you’d be right.

“Horseshoe crabs are an ecologically and economically important species in the

Delaware Estuary, which hosts the largest concentrations of horseshoe crabs in the world,” said

Gov. Jack Markell in a 2013 press conference.

Horseshoe crabs in the last 200 years have been ground up for fertilizer, chopped up for

eel bait and bled dry to make bacterial testing compounds. Their job of being a crucial food

source for migrating shore birds, like the Red Knot, is the only thing they have not been doing.

This means both species, and possibly more are in danger of extinction.

For over 350 million years, these living dinosaurs have been coming to shorelines along

the East Coast to mate. Since its forming less than 12,000 years ago, the Delaware Bay has been

the epicenter for horseshoe crab spawning, according to Horseshoecrab.org.

Horseshoe crabs are not horseshoes, nor are they actual crabs. These marine oddities are

arthropods with one big brown shell covering their whole body to protect it from predators. They

coast along the ocean floor with five pairs of legs, ten eyes, and one barb-like tail called a telson.
 Rising out of the sea to spawn each May and June, millions of these alien-like arthropods

come ashore along the Delaware Bay. This coastal takeover is most dramatic when there is a full

or new moon, creating the highest tides of the month. When the spawning is over, beaches are

littered with billions of blueish-green horseshoe crab eggs.

Though their yearly spawning trip to Delaware and New Jersey beaches is no new

tradition, the exploit of this annual event easily caught on in the late 19th century. Starting from

the 1850’s and going into the 1920’s, between 1.5 and two million horseshoe crabs were

harvested annually for fertilizer and livestock feed, according to the Atlantic States Marine

Fisheries Commission.

This trend of turning horseshoe crabs into fertilizer died down, and was replaced by a

wave of fishermen needing eel and whelk bait. Increased need for bait for a growing market of

eel and whelk likely caused an increase in horseshoe crab harvest in the 1990s. The Atlantic

States Marine Fisheries Commission reported the decade’s peak of nearly six million pounds of

horseshoe crabs had been harvested in 1997 alone.

Outside of enriching soil and attracting eels, the attribute that makes horseshoe crabs a

hot commodity still today is their baby blue blood. The color is not the only thing that makes the

blood special though. In the 1970s, the Food and Drug Administration licensed a medical test

that employed horseshoe crab blood as its main component.

This medical test goes by the name of LAL, or Limulus Amebocyte Lysate. LAL is used

as the worldwide standard for detecting bacterial endotoxins in intravenous drug and medical

devices, according to Horseshoecrabs.org. This application of horseshoe crab blood is a cost and
time efficient alternative to previous testing methods, and saves millions of people from possible

bacterial infections.

“Coast wide, about 600,000 horseshoe crabs are captured, scrubbed and bled each year.

About a quarter of the animal’s blood is collected. The procedure kills about 15 percent of

them.” said Stewart Michels of Delaware’s Division of Fish & Wildlife. “There may be sub-

lethal impacts like failed spawning.”

With this relatively new life-saving use for horseshoe crab blood, our long one-sided

relationship we’ve had with them continues. While there used to be millions of Horseshoe crabs

appearing up on beaches along the Delaware Bay, the numbers now are just under a million each

year. Regulations have been set in place however to minimize or completely ban horseshoe crab

fishing in some places along the Delaware Bay.

One reason for these regulations, is because of the somewhat recent evidence showing a

rapid population decline in a shore bird called the Red knot. This decline is not due to hunting or

deforestation, but instead related directly to the decrease in horseshoe crab populations over the

years.

Red knots are small robin-sized shore birds that are only about 9 inches long, and depend

heavily on horseshoe crab eggs as a source of subsidence during their migration. Some Red knots

fly more than 9,300 miles from south to north every spring and repeat the trip in reverse every

autumn, making this bird one of the longest-distance migrants in the animal kingdom, according

to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

 The old saying of taking two birds out with one stone applies quite accurately to this

situation. Instead of two birds though, what’s getting taken out is one bird and a whole lot of

arthropods.

Marketing Director for Delaware State Parks, Abby Sheppard, has been doing yearly

horseshoe crab surveys through the Delaware National Estuarine Research Reserve (DNERR) for

the past three years. Sheppard spoke on the importance of the horseshoe crab and red knot’s

relationship, as well as the surveying process.

“Horseshoe crab eggs are an important food source for migrating shore birds like Red

knots, and Horseshoe crab blood is critical in the medical field for sterilizations.” Sheppard said.

“The surveys are part of a larger research study to track the population of the crabs in the

region.”

Sheppard is among hundreds of volunteers that take to the Delaware Bay beaches in May

and June of each year to help contribute to Horseshoe crab population research. This mixed with

the amount of volunteer birders that count and tag Red knots each migratory season, help paint

the full picture.

According to the American Bird Conservancy’s website, when Red knots leave Delaware

Bay in poor condition due to the lack of Horseshoe crab eggs, they either die before ever arriving

in the Arctic or arrive in too poor a condition to successfully reproduce. As a result, adult birds

are dying off without being replaced by juveniles, leading to a decline in population.
 Elly Pepper, Deputy Director for the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote in 2014

that, “Over the past 10 years, the Red knot population has declined by 80% to less than 35,000

due to food shortages at a key resting point during their spring migration: Delaware Bay.”

Surveyors in Tierra de Fuego, South America saw Red Knots overwintering at the site

had fallen dramatically – to a shocking 9,840 birds in 2018. This is a 25% decrease on the

number recorded in January 2017 (13,127), marginally the lowest recorded since surveys began

(the previous low was 9,850 birds in 2011), According to Birdlife.org.

Given that such a rapid decline in population has happened in the last decade alone, the

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had no choice but to list the Red knot as “Threatened” under the

Endangered Species Act in December of 2014.

“Red Knots, and other migratory shorebirds, have evolved to take advantage of the

abundance horseshoe crab eggs that peak in availability exactly when the birds return from South

America on their northern migration.” said Greg Shriver, Ornithology professor at the University

of Delaware. “The Delaware Bay crab population provides one of the most important migratory

bird stopover areas in the world.”

The Monarch butterfly and the Milkweed plant. The Arctic fox and Arctic hares. Panda

bears and Bamboo. All of these species, like the Red knot, depend heavily on a single food

source, and could very well go extinct without it.

More than 26,500 species are threatened with extinction. That is more than 27% of all

assessed species, according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This is caused by a
plethora of factors, but some species are threatened by things like overfishing or loss of habitat

from deforestation. Things we cause, and things we can stop or fix.

Horseshoe crabs have been around for over 350 million years, and if humanity isn’t

careful, they could be gone within a few hundred years of us co-existing with them. With them,

will go the red knot, and possibly many more shore birds like the Sanderling, Ruddy turnstone,

and Semi-palmated sandpiper.

“Each species adds unique traits to its environment and corresponding food chains. The

extinction of one species can cause cascades of negative effects through entire ecosystems, and

can affect human way of life as well.” Sheppard said.

Tunnel vision of the situation may depict species only getting taken out one by one, but

the big picture shows the more troubling actuality. This being the slippery slope of mass

extinction most species now face. These species were around for tens of thousands, and

sometimes millions, of years before we started causing extinctions in the last thousand years

alone. If humanity isn’t careful, the only animals left will be farm animals and domesticated pets.