Horseshoe crabs have been around for millions of years, but their habitats are increasingly being degraded and study finds that they are also in demand for the medical industry.
About Horseshoe crab:
It belongs to a class called Merostomata, living fossils, or those organisms that haven’t changed in millennia.
It is a marine chelicerate arthropod. The Chelicerata is a division within the Arthropoda, containing animals such as spiders, scorpions, harvestmen, mites and ticks.
Like all arthropods, they have a segmented body and segmented limbs and a thick chitinous cuticle called an exoskeleton.
Habitat: They are living in shallow coastal waters on soft sandy or muddy bottoms and spawn mostly on intertidal beaches at summer-spring high tides.
There are four extant horseshoe crab species:
The American horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) along the eastern coast of the USA and in the Gulf of Mexico,
The tri-spine horseshoe crab (Tachypleus tridentatus),
The coastal horseshoe crab (Tachypleus gigas)
The mangrove horseshoe crab (Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda)
The last three are Indo-Pacific species found mainly in the coastal waters of India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan.
In India, Odisha is the largest habitat of horseshoe crabs.
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