Horseshoe Crabs Love Marine Aquariums

A horseshoe crab makes a nice resident for your marine aquariums. Touch-Tank caught up with Coastal Carol an expert in intertidal exploration to learn more about the horseshoe crabs that have survived for over 250 million years. The video depicts some of what we learned about the horseshoe crab.

Contact Touch Tanks for Kids to bring an interactive aquarium experience to your students. They will learn more when observing a horseshoe crab molt and mature. Grants available!

Caution:

Handle with care; you can pinch your fingers between the two parts of the shell.

Mating

Each spring during the high tides of the new and full moons, horseshoe crabs come to the sandy shorelines to spawn. They lay there green eggs in sand and depend on waves to wash the sand over the nest.

Males are generally smaller than their mates. They cluster along the water’s edge and wait patiently for the females to arrive. The male attaches to the female’s shell with glove-like claws and awaits high tide. He fertilizes the eggs when he is pulled over the nest where the female deposit as many as 20,000 green eggs in sand. After the spring ritual is over, they return to the deeper waters of the ocean.

Horseshoe Crab Facts

They are not really crabs

They are related to scorpions, ticks and spiders

They have their own classification (Class Merostomata)

Their blood is blue

They are not dangerous

They are found along the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean from Maine to the Yucatan with another three species living in the coastal waters from Japan to Indonesia

They can go a year without eating

Their hard, curved shells protect them from predators.

They endure extreme temperatures and salinity changes

Their tails push them through the sand and muck, act as a rudder, and help them turnover

Their central mouth is surrounded by its legs

Their eggs take about 2 weeks to hatch

They have 2 compound eyes on the top of their shells with a range of about 3 feet

They can swim upside down and use a dozen legs and  a flap hiding nearly 200 flattened gills to propel themselves

They usual feed at night but will eat anytime

They burrow for worms and mollusks

They grow by twenty-five percent while molting

The larvae molt six times during the first year

After sixteen molts, they completely mature into adults, maturity takes between 9 and 12 years

Before the arrival of artificial fertilizers, they were dried for used as fertilizer and poultry food supplements.

Some fish eat the juveniles and the recently molted

Their eggs are important food for migratory shore birds that pass over the Delaware Bay during the spring mating season

Extract from their blood  is used to test the purity of medicines.

Parts of their shells speed blood clotting and are used for absorbent sutures. Read more on Horseshoe Crabs Love Marine Aquariums…