Exploring the animal world with my daughter is a responsibility as a mother which I relish. Her questions have led us on a journey, often chronicled in this column, which has expanded my animal knowledge and her vision of the world. Unfortunately a few weeks ago, this exploration led us down a path I hope to not encounter again. Although everything turned out alright in the end, after two visits to the Emergency Room and another to a walk-in clinic, we have added an additional animal to our list of natural discoveries.
While visiting local beaches and exploring the shore, my daughter enjoys learning about the creatures that live there. As fast as her little brown feet will carry her, she carries various shells and seaweeds over, peppering me with questions about what they are, what they eat or where they live. On one such outing, I found something in an empty shell which I had never seen before; miniscule turquoise eggs all clustered together. After 40 years of scouring New England beaches, I was intrigued by not knowing what it was. So what did I do? Of course I picked it up and spread the eggs out in my hand for my daughter to see, rolling them around my fingers showing her how they stuck together and we imagined what tiny creatures were eventually going to emerge.
After their examination, we returned the eggs to the ocean and wished the little creatures a long productive life. That was when I noticed the hives on the back of both hands; scattering across the skin and worming their way up my arms. Fortunately a friend on the beach had Benedryl cream and that stopped the initial reaction. After three courses of steroids and various antihistamine prescriptions, the hives have subsided. And thanks to an observant receptionist at the walk-in clinic on Martha’s Vineyard , I now know that I am allergic to dinosaurs.
The tiny turquoise eggs were actually a row of horseshoe crab eggs. Horseshoe crabs are not true crabs, but arthropods, more closely related to spiders and scorpions. The earliest horseshoe crab fossils date back 450 million years ago and they have not changed during that amazing amount of time.
Their prehistoric appearance makes them an anomaly in our present day world, but to take note of their importance to our world makes them an extraordinary local creature. The crabs return annually to the sands of their birth to lay their own eggs, females’ lay approximately 100,000 eggs which in turn feed migrating shorebirds. Scientists are unsure what allows the crabs to determine which sand they were hatched from, but this instinctual behavior has prevented researchers from breeding horseshoe crabs in captivity.
Biomedical researchers have used the unique blood of the horseshoe crab to make medical advances which we all benefit from. With this, they are able to test intravenous medications, devices and vaccines to ensure they are free from contaminants; no other testing has been as reliable.
Horseshoe crabs shells are actually an exoskeleton made of a material called chitin. This material is tough yet flexible and when processed into Chitosan, it is a water-soluble base for numerous medical uses. The chitin from the horseshoe crabs shell has been used to develop chitin-coated filament for suturing and chitin-coated wound dressing for burn victims; apparently reducing recovery time by 35-50%. Water purification, wastewater treatment processes, dietary supplements and cosmetics have also been assisted by horseshoe crab chitin.
Horseshoe crabs are vulnerable to habitat loss due to pollution, shoreline development and human interference. They are harvested for their blood and chitin by researchers; and fisherman who are interested in using them for bait for eeling. Due to the fact that it takes approximately ten years for them to reach sexual maturity, both incidents affect their breeding life and long term sustainability.
The future of the world’s four remaining species of horseshoe crabs may be based on the preservation of our shorelines. In 1999, the “Horseshoe Crab Sanctuary Program” was launched. Conserving our beaches for their natural inhabitants should be a primary focus of our future. Once these natural beauties are gone, they can never be replaced.
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