Plumb Beach, Brooklyn, New York in USA is an important horseshoe crab breeding and nursery ground that has experienced substantial anthropogenic influence, including pollution, erosion and subsequent restoration. Since little is known about the relationship between sediment microbial communities and juvenile horseshoe crab survival, next generation sequencing was used to characterize and compar...

Each spring adult horseshoe crabs migrate from deep bay waters and the Atlantic continental shelf to intertidal sandy beaches to spawn. Horseshoe crabs are an important food source for migrating shorebirds that feed on the eggs, for migrating fish that feed on the eggs and larvae and for Atlantic loggerhead turtles that feed on horseshoe crabs while using the Chesapeake Bay as a summer nursery ...

Management of the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, is currently surrounded by controversy. The species is considered a multiple-use resource, as it plays an important role as bait in a commercial fishery, as a source of an important biomedical product, as an important food source for multiple species of migratory shorebirds, as well as in several other minor, but important, uses. Concern has...

Problem from eating poisonous seafood can be seen in marine medicine[1-3]. Several marine animals can be toxic. The good examples are fishes[4], mussels[5] and shellfishes[6,7]. Horseshoe crab (Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda) can be poisonous and intoxication due to intake is possible[8]. Horseshoe crab poisoning can be seen in many countries with seacoasts including China and Thailand. In animal...

Horseshoe crabs have been identified as one of the marine species that contribute greatly to scientific advances especially in haematological studies. Besides the haemocytes of these creatures, they are also well known for their protein contents in the perivitelline fluid (PVF). Due to this, over the years, there has been increasing interests in the scientific community to explore the function ...

The complement system has been thought to originate exclusively in the deuterostomes. Here, we show that the central complement components already existed in the primitive protostome lineage. A functional homolog of vertebrate complement 3, CrC3, has been isolated from a 'living fossil', the horseshoe crab (Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda). CrC3 resembles human C3 and shows closest homology to C3 ...

Understanding the relationship between metal level in predators and their prey is an important issue, and is usually difficult to determine because animals eat a variety of organisms. However, shorebirds that stop over during spring migration along Delaware Bay (New Jersey) stay for only 2-3 weeks, and eat mainly horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) eggs. In this paper, we examine the relationsh...

In this paper we present a particular history of Limulus polyphemus, the horseshoe crab, as a means of expanding on Haraway’s notion of companion species. Drawing on accounts of the horseshoe crab’s role, on the one hand, in work of the Serological Museum at Rutgers University that spanned the 1940s to the 1970s, and, on the other, in the development of the limulus amebocyte lysate test, we tra...

Biomedical companies extract blood from the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, for the production of Limulus Amebocyte Lysate, used worldwide for detecting endotoxins in injectable solutions and medical devices. Despite the extensive use of horseshoe crabs by the biomedical industry, total hemolymph volume in animals of a given size is not known. The hemolymph volume of 60 adult horseshoe crab...