Uses
of Horseshoe Crabs
Hundreds of years
ago Native Americans used the horseshoe crab as food and for fishing bait.
The tail was used as a spear tip, the shell was used as a canoe bailer,
and the Native Americans were the first to discover that horseshoe crabs
make an excellent fertilizer. Later in the late 1800’s and early
1900’s, fishermen thought the crabs were pests because they would
get caught in the fishing nets and were hard to untangle.
photo permission: Delaware
State Archives
Then someone got
the idea to "harvest" the crabs. People would collect the crabs when they
came to shore to reproduce. They would stack them in huge piles and then
let the sun dry them out. Then the crabs would be taken to factories where
they were ground up for fertilizer. Delmarva farmers started using
millions of horseshoe crabs for slow release fertilizer and for chicken
and hog food. Up to four million crabs a year were harvested just
in the 1870’s.
photo permission: Delaware State Archives
Today the horseshoe
crab plays an important role in the Delaware Bay’s food web, the biomedical
industry, and the Atlantic coast fisheries.
To learn more
about each of these uses click below:
As
part of the Delaware Bay food web
Biomedical
Industry
Eel
and conch bait
Because of the many uses of horseshoe
crabs, there are many different groups of people interested in their future.
The birders, environmentalists, commercial fishers, biomedical companies,
coastal residents, and the Delaware Bay ecotourism industry are all concerned.
This makes the management of horseshoe crabs
especially challenging.
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