By Jon Hurdle NJ Spotlight
Conservationists’ ongoing battle to protect New Jersey’s shorebirds and specifically the imperiled red knot has taken a new turn, this time over limits on the harvesting of horseshoe crabs that are a vital food source to the birds.
Conservationists have formally challenged a plan by fisheries regulators to change their method of counting horseshoe crabs in the Delaware Bay and determine new limits on harvesting. The plan by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission would add two new crab counts to an existing survey and lift a ban on harvesting female crabs until their numbers reach a certain level.
The crabs provide the eggs that the red knot and other migratory birds depend on for their food. They are also taken in unknown numbers for their blood, which is used by the biomedical industry for detecting toxins in medical products.
Conservationists argue that the regulators’ plan will overestimate the crab population, allowing for more harvesting and resulting in fewer crabs. The harvest of female crabs, in particular, has been banned for almost a decade in an effort to rebuild the population after it was decimated by overharvesting in the 1990s.
“Now is not the time for ASMFC to revise its horseshoe crab management framework in a manner that would allow even greater harvest, including the resumption of the harvest of the critical female component of the population,” said Earthjustice, an environmental law nonprofit, in a letter to the commission on Wednesday.
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