New Haven Independent

Meanwhile, state environmental officials said they’re confident their regulations will protect the species.

Casey, a New Haven building contractor, took up the crabs’ cause several years ago. He succeeded in getting three beaches, including West Haven’s, put off-limits to horseshoe crab fishing. He says the population is down to a small fraction of its historic numbers, and warns that state Department of Environmental Protection regulations that allow tens of thousands of animals to be taken each year will lead to the disappearance of these amazing prehistoric creatures.

(Click here to read a related story from this week’s New York Times science section.)

Warm and fuzzy they may not be, but they are fascinating, as anyone who has ever turned one over can attest. Also fascinating is the mating ritual, where several males woo a much larger female. The crab eggs that result are prime food for migrating birds, Casey (pictured) pointed out, leaving birds that depend on them, like the redknot, in dire straits.

The horseshoe crab fishery has been managed since 1999 by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, to which all 15 coastal states send representatives. Eric Smith, the DEP’s representative to the commission, said a quota was set for each state, but in 2004, quotas were lowered by about 30 percent when the Commission was not satisfied “with the response of the stock over the first five years of management.” Connecticut’s quota dropped from roughly 60,000 to 48,000. Smith said no one knows what percent of the total population these numbers represent.

The crabs are caught mostly to be chopped up and used as bait to catch eels, which in turn are bait for a prized sport fish, the striped bass. The blood of the crabs is also extracted for bio-medical research, but those crabs are thrown back alive, Smith said.

“The quota is to try to cut down on mortality and allow for the expansion of resource abundance,” Smith explained in his best bureaucratese. He said the DEP created lots of regulations to protect the crabs, such as approving licenses to only 26 fishermen in the state, compared to the several hundred who earlier had such licenses (the department found that only 26 of those actually harvested any of the crabs, so they limited the licenses to those individuals). The DEP allows each person to take up to 500 crabs per day, but they must take them by hand, unassisted by rakes or hooks. Smith said in practice many don’t catch their limit.

Another regulation banned fishing for the crabs on weekends during the mid-May to early July season, the rationale being that since many if not most of the licensed fishermen have other jobs and can only go out on weekends, this would help to protect the resource. He added that crabs tend to come on the beach at the full and new moons, and there are only a few of those in the entire season.

Smith said the Atlantic commission wouldn’t have created these regulations if its members didn’t think they had to take some precautions to protect the horseshoe crab fishery, and he’s confident these restrictions have done so, but added, “We’re perfectly willing to look at it again when we see how the system responds to it, and by ‘system’ I mean the crabs and the people.”

But Casey said none of this is enough.

A passionate campaigner for these “non-warm-and-fuzzy” creatures, he sometimes signs his emails, “sympathy for the dying.” He said the reason some of fishermen don’t reach their quota of 500 a day is because the population has already crashed. He called the Atlantic Commission “the biggest joke,” and said of the fisheries lobby, “They are like strip miners or clear-cut forest guys — they won’t stop ‘til they [the marine resources] are all gone.”

He said the numbers now are only about ten percent of their historic numbers in Long Island Sound. But Smith said there’s no way to know that because there are no good records, “which means it’s in the eye of the beholder when people claim it’s been reduced 90 percent.”

To which Casey responded, sarcastically, “We have no data, so the onus is on the crab itself.” He said recent reports have indicated that the number of shorebirds has declined by 90 percent, as has the number of fish in the oceans, so why should the fate of the horseshoe crabs be any different?

Casey said after the three horseshoe crab sanctuaries were created — on an island near Westbrook, at Sandy Point in West Haven and at Charles Island near Silver Sands Beach in Milford — fishermen moved their operation to other beaches.

“In New Haven, they’ve moved to the Long Wharf area, where they take every single crab off the beach. I don’t believe anybody in New Haven wants their beaches stripped clean because of poor regulation by the DEP.” He said he and another advocate set up the Harbor Group, which works with other New Haven groups like the New Haven Land Trust and the Bioregional Group. Their goal is to close New Haven Harbor, the state of Connecticut, and the whole Atlantic seaboard to horseshoe crab fishing, “until more is known about this problem.”

Kristine Sainsbury is a City Point community activist who, among her many neighborhood projects, is a supporter of the Long Wharf Nature Preserve, where she has researched the native flora and fauna. She believes nature’s chain has been severely weakened, if not broken, by the taking of so many horseshoe crabs.

“All indigenous species are interdependent, and over the eons these ancient creatures have been acting as a Soundkeeper of sorts, by consuming biological flotsam and jetsam, both at surface and bottom levels,” she wrote in an email message.

“When the biodiversity of New Haven Harbor begins to change, we start to notice little things, yet we don’t usually attribute a cause and effect.” For example, she wrote that people strolling the preserve “started to notice that plovers no longer nest in the Preserve; that horseshoe crabs have become scarce and can no longer be found along our Long Wharf shore. The Long Wharf Nature Preserve was going to try for an important bird area designation, but, sadly, we’ve found the Preserve no longer has the number of birds required for that designation.”

While not as sweeping as Casey’s goal of protecting the species all along the Atlantic Coast, Sainsbury’s goal is to have Long Wharf designated as the fourth Horseshoe Crab Preserve/No Take Zone. “However,” she added, “to incorporate New Haven Harbor East and West, Inner and Outer would be ideal - a win-win situation ecologically and sociologically.”

She concluded by writing that last Wednesday she and two others went down to the Preserve at high tide. “We only counted five horseshoe crabs, where not so long ago it was hard to find a spot to use as a footing for all the horseshoe crabs. It made me weep.”

This reporter made three unsuccessful attempts to find fishermen at Long Wharf on various days last week. Perhaps they weren’t there because they were all working their day jobs. Or perhaps it was because there were no more horseshoe crabs to harvest.