Wildlife

By Craig Leisher, senior social scientist

Horseshoe crabs are, arguably, the most successful animals on earth, having survived for 445 million years. That’s 440 million years longer than humans and 130 million years longer than the über-survivor cockroach.

It’s the ‘crab moon’ right now when hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs come ashore to lay eggs in the sands of Delaware Bay in the eastern United States. The crabs have been coming to beaches like these for a long, long time.

If there were actuarial tables for species survival, horseshoe crabs would have the world’s lowest species survival insurance premiums. They have already made it through asteroids hitting the earth, at least three ice ages, changes in sea level, and large fluctuations in atmospheric CO 2 .

But their biggest challenge in this aeon may be surviving people harvesting them by the pickup-truck load to be ground into fertilizer or used as bait for eel and conch fishing. A large female can sell for $5 to an eel fisherman, and horseshoe crabs are ridiculously easy to catch during spawning season. You just pick them up with your hands. They don’t bite, and they can’t run.

In addition to being the first input on the way to catching eels for sushi or conch for a sandwich, horseshoe crabs are big in medicine.

There’s a $50-million (US) industry that does nothing but collect blood from horseshoe crabs. The animals are true blue bloods with a copper-based blood that’s the color of lapis lazuli.

Horseshoe crab blood has a unique property: in the presence of bacterial, it turns to jelly and creates a barrier against the bacteria. The space shuttle team used horseshoe crab blood to wipe down shuttle surfaces and ensure they were bacterial free.

The medical industry uses the blood to ensure injectable drugs are free of endotoxins. After the blood letting, the crabs are released back into the wild, and of course, all but a small percentage survive.

What does it take to make it 445 million years? In addition to anti-pathogen blue blood, the horseshoe crab has gills that are like the pages of a book allowing it to breath out of water so long as its gills stay wet, ten eyes for detecting potential mates, food and predators, and the ability to produce 90,000 fertile eggs a year.

In the Delaware Bay, migratory shore birds time their travels to arrive just as the horseshoe crabs start to emerge from the water to lay their eggs. The Bay is a prime refueling station for the Red Knot.

The rufa Red Knot is a legendary frequent flyer that migrates from the high artic to the tip of South American and back every year. One Red Knot, ‘B95’, has done the round trip so many times, he’s flown the distance to the moon and half way back. In May 2013, he was photographed on the beach in the Delaware Bay eating horseshoe crab eggs 18 years after he was first banded with the identification number B95.

The horseshoe crab may be weird and ugly, and more closely related to spiders than crabs, but it’s the world’s most successful animal and will probably outlast even the cockroach.

Opinions expressed on Cool Green Science and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Nature Conservancy.