In the PBS Nature presentation chronicling the demise of the red knot population, which they said took place precipitously in the 1990’s, they blamed it on the supposedly coinciding drop of the population of spawning horseshoe crabs. It was said that commercial fishermen discovered in that decade that female horseshoe crabs with eggs inside them were great bait for their eel and conch traps. This is patently false. This knowledge has been passed down to East Coast fishermen for centuries. If anything, the use by commercial fishermen has precipitously dropped in recent decades by virtue of the fact that there are and were far fewer young men opting for this dirty, dangerous and physically and financially precarious lifestyle.
If, as has been asserted in this slick production, the fall of the red knot numbers is due to the allegedly falling density of horseshoe crab eggs on the Mid-Atlantic shores, it is most probably due to the collection of these prehistoric looking creatures for medical purposes. What is hidden between the lines of the Nature script is that, while there has been a total moratorium of commercial harvest for several years of the often crusty crustaceans, medical harvesters are free to take all they can catch. And even though the animals are released after they are emptied of about one-third of their blue blood still alive, they are harvested while they are gathering for their shore side spawning ritual, disrupting the spawn before the eggs have been dropped. And this is what was new in the 1990’s. As fishermen who hold the crabs alive for weeks and months for later bait use know, if you disturb the spawning females, they can and will hold their eggs indefinitely. Taking them out of the spawn just when the little birds need the eggs has the same effect, whatever that is, as taking them and cutting them up for bait, even if they are put back alive, even discounting the significant number that die after the bleeding process.
The other effective change that began to happen in the ’90’s is global warming. Given this bird’s living quarters near the poles on both ends of the earth, isn’t this more likely to be the active principle here? But then again, these self-appointed red knot saviors wouldn’t be garnishing much attention away from Al Gore if they stated that to be the case, would they …..
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