Crab Wars by William Sargent

Author:William Sargent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of New England

PART III

Environmental Conflicts

CHAPTER 11

Fishing for Bait: The Conch and Eel Fisheries

[Delaware Bay, 1990–2000]

HUMANS HAVE USED horseshoe crabs for almost as long as the two species have coexisted. Native Americans fertilized their fields with horseshoe crabs and fashioned spear points from the crabs’ tails. Colonial farmers followed the Native Americans’ example, using horseshoe crabs for fertilizer and chicken feed.

It wasn’t until the mid-1800s that the use of horseshoe crabs for fertilizer and chicken feed became a bona fide industry. As part of his postdoctoral work, Carl Shuster chronicled the Delaware Bay industry by collecting archival photographs of the practice. The photos showed that fishermen on the Delaware side of the bay could simply pluck the mating crabs off the beach and stack them like cordwood. Each neat pile contained hundreds of thousands of rotting corpses. On the New Jersey side of the bay fishermen had to catch horseshoe crabs in offshore pound nets. Then they tossed the crabs willy-nilly into seventy-foot-long wooden holding pens that held eighteen thousand crabs at a time. On both sides of the bay, the piles of dead and dying horseshoe crabs raised such a stench that neighbors complained, and chicken eggs smelled like old fish.

Place names are believed to reflect the old practices: Murderkill River, Dead Horse Creek, King Crab Landing, and Slaughter Beach. If they do not refer to the old industry, one shudders to contemplate the alternative explanations.

More than four million crabs were killed in 1870, but then the fishery started to decline decade by decade until it totally collapsed in 1950. The industry was stopped in the 1960s not because of what you might hope for—concern for the animals—but because of the smell of rotting horseshoe crabs. (Environmentalists have learned to be philosophical about such things: if odors prove stronger than science, argue smell over numbers.) After the fertilizer companies shut their doors, the population of horseshoe crabs rebounded so well that by 1977, when David Attenborough arrived to film his award-winning television series Life on Earth, there were more than enough horseshoe crabs mating on Delaware Bay to be suitably impressive.

But by the 1980s horseshoe crabs were facing a new threat. During the spring and fall, blue-crab fishermen and oyster dredgers had traditionally set out eel pots to make a little off-season money. Their favorite bait was large egg-laden female horseshoe crabs, so the fishermen would fan out on the beaches of Delaware Bay during the new- and full-moon tides of April and May to collect the spawning crabs. It was an extremely easy task. Hundreds of thousands of crabs would simply crawl up to the fishermen’s boots in their frenzy to lay and fertilize their eggs. The fishermen could collect more than enough crabs to fill their needs. Half of the crabs would be chopped into pieces and stuffed into eel pots to catch “shoestring” eels in the spring. The rest of the crabs would be frozen to be used in the fall to catch silver eels as they prepared to

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