The American Horseshoe Crab

Horseshoe crabs, those mysterious ancient mariners, lured me into the sea as a child along the beaches of New Jersey. Drawn to their shiny domed shells and spiked tails, I could not resist picking them up, turning them over and watching the wondrous mechanical movement of their glistening legs, articulating with one another as smoothly as the inner working of a clock. What was it like to be a horseshoe crab, I wondered? What did they eat? Did they always move around together? Why were some so large and others much smaller? How old were they, anyway? What must it feel like to live underwater? What else was out there, down there, in the cool, green depths that gave rise to such intriguing creatures? The only way to find out, I reasoned, would be to go into the ocean and see for myself, and so I did, and more than 60 years later, I still do.

This book brings together 20 scientists who have worked on all aspects of horseshoe crab biology to compile the first fully detailed, comprehensive view of Limulus polyphemus. An indispensable resource, the volume describes behavior, natural history, and ecology; anatomy, physiology, distribution, development, and life cycle.

Describes the physical characteristics, habits, life cycle, and conservation of horseshoe crabs.

Surviving almost unmolested for 300 million years, the horseshoe crab is now the object of an intense legal and ethical struggle involving marine biologists, environmentalists, US government officials, biotechnologists, and international corporations. The source of this friction is the discovery 25 years ago that the blood of these ancient creatures serves as the basis for the most reliable test for the deadly and ubiquitous gram-negative bacteria. These bacteria are responsible for life-threatening diseases like menengitis, typhoid, E. coli, Legionnaire's Disease and toxic shock syndrome. Because every drug certified by the FDA must be tested using the horseshoe crab derivative known as Limulus lysate, a multimillion dollar industry has emerged involving the license to "bleed" horseshoe crabs and the rights to their breeding grounds. Since his youthful fascination with these ancient creatures, William Sargent has spent much of his life observing, studying, and collecting horseshoe crabs. As a result, he presents a thoroughly accessible insider's guide to the discovery of the lysate test, the exploitation of the crabs at the hands of multinational pharmaceutical conglomerates, local fishing interests, and the legal and governmental wrangling over the creatures' ultimate fate. In the end, the story of the horseshoe crab is a sobering reflection on the unintended consequences of scientific progress and the danger of self-regulated industries controlling a limited natural resource.

Dual-layered text introduces the life cycle of the horseshoe crab, with a focus on the annual mass-spawning event at Delaware Bay.

This book reports significant progress of scientific research on horseshoe crabs, including aspects of evolution, genetics, ecology, population dynamics, general biology and physiology, within the recent 10 years. It also highlights the emerging issues related to world-wide conservation threats, status and needs. The contributions in this book represent part of an ongoing global effort to increase data and concept sharing to support basic research and advance conservation for horseshoe crabs.

The unexpected and fascinating interspecies relationship between humans and horseshoe crabs. Horseshoe crabs are considered both a prehistoric and indicator species. They have not changed in tens of millions of years and provide useful data to scientists who monitor the health of the environment. From the pharmaceutical industry to paleontologists to the fishing industry, the horseshoe crab has made vast, but largely unknown, contributions to human life and our shared ecosystem. Catch and Release examines how these intersections steer the trajectory of both species’ lives, and futures. Based on interviews with conservationists, field biologists, ecologists, and paleontologists over three years of fieldwork on urban beaches, noted ethnographer Lisa Jean Moore shows how humans literally harvest the life out of the horseshoe crabs. We use them as markers for understanding geologic time, collect them for agricultural fertilizer, and eat them as delicacies, capture them as bait, then rescue them for conservation, and categorize them as endangered. The book details the biomedical bleeding of crabs; how they are caught, drained of 40% of their blood, and then released back into their habitat. The model of catch and release is essential. Horseshoe crabs cannot be bred in captivity and can only survive in their own ecosystems. Moore shows how horseshoe crabs are used as an exploitable resource, and are now considered a “vulnerable” species. An investigation of how humans approach animals that are essential for their survival, Catch and Release questions whether humans should have divine, moral, or ethical claims to any living being in their path.

The first International Conference on Horseshoe Crab’s Conservation conducted at Dowling College, USA, (2007) and it’s proceedings published by Springer in 2009, prompted the continued research and conservation efforts presented at subsequent conferences and colloquium in Hong Kong, Taiwan, (2011); San Diego, CA, (2014), (CERF); Japan, Sasebo (2015) and an accepted inclusion for a special session on Horseshoe Crabs at the 2017 CERF Conference held in Providence, RI, USA. All these aforementioned conferences contributed manuscripts, posters, workshop “position papers”, and oral presentations the majority of which have not been published in total. In 2015, Carmichael et al. had published by Springer the majority of manuscripts from the 2011 Hong Kong / Taiwan conference. However, workshop results and all subsequent presentations and workshops were not. The Japan conference presented over 40 papers alone. A collection of all workshop summaries, poster presentations and new manuscript submittals (San Diego, CA; Sasebo, Japan; and Providence, RI) as well as products prepared for the IUCN World Congress in Hawaii, (2016), are included potential contributions for review in this compilation now available for global distribution in this Springer Nature publication. The “Proceedings of International Conferences on the Biology and Conservation of Horseshoe Crabs”, thus contains over 50 manuscripts and a diversified collection of documents, photos and memorabilia covering all four of the horseshoe crab species globally: their biology, ecology evolution, educational, and societal importance. This book exposes the impacts that humans have imposed on all four of these species, revealing through the coordinated effort of horseshoe crab scientists with the IUCN, of the worldwide need for a clear conservative effort to protect these paleo- survival organisms from a looming extinction event. Biologists, conservationists, educators, and health professionals will all welcome this book not only for exploration of its pharmacological interest, but also for the mystery of their longevity. This book also clarifies the future research needs and the conservation agenda for the species worldwide. Anyone working or studying estuaries on a global scale, will need to obtain this seminal work on horseshoe crabs.