Every spring, John Rodenhausen looks forward to seeing a few horseshoe crabs on the beach at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s headquarters outside Annapolis. But this year, Rodenhausen says, thousands of the prehistoric-looking creatures, which resemble spiders more than crabs, were mating on the Annapolis beach in late May. As is their wont, the smaller males attach to the larger female, sometimes four to five at a time — one large carapace surrounded by smaller ones, like points on a star.
“It blew us all away,” says Rodenhausen, the foundation’s Maryland development director. “You’ll always see a few, and you might see a dozen, but we saw thousands. And it wasn’t even a full moon.”
“They’re definitely not cute and cuddly, but they’re nerdy cool,” says Stewart Michels, program manager for the fisheries section with the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. “Nowadays, we are seeing a lot of kids, school groups, individuals. They’re coming just to see the horseshoe crabs.”
To save the red knot, wildlife officials in New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia and Maryland implemented some conservation measures and have been tweaking them ever since. New Jersey has gone the furthest, with a moratorium on any harvest of horseshoe crabs since 2006.
Virginia cut its horseshoe crab fishery, but only when the federal government forced its hand. As recently as 1998, harvesters took an estimated one million crabs for the state’s conch, eel and whelk fisheries. But since then the Virginia Marine Resources Commission has begun restricting the harvest and, under pressure from federal fisheries officials and the ASMFC, and has been gradually tightening them. Virginia’s quota is now about the same as Delaware’s, with the added restrictions that harvesters can take only five per day and cannot trawl for the animals in state waters or within 3 miles of the coast.
The harvest limits reduced the horseshoe crab catch for bait by about 75 percent coast-wide, Michels says. They were gradual; Delaware completed its management plan in 1998, and began phasing in the cuts over the following five or six years. But Michels says he believes the restrictions are making a difference. Eel fishermen once used a half or a whole crab to bait a pot; conch fishermen sometimes used more.
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