In the end, it changed nothing. Each state, however, must gather monthly horseshoe crab landing records, which could ultimately support future harvest quotas. The plan confirmed conservationists' worst fears. Fishery councils, after all, have traditionally been slow to react to population declines, as witnessed most notoriously in the collapse of the North Atlantic cod stock. According to the only published estimate of crab numbers, from a decade ago, fewer than four million North American horseshoe crabs may exist, anywhere.
Fishermen trust their own math, and their own suspicion that far more crabs are out there.
Scientists simply aren't looking in the right places, they say. Indeed, spawning crabs may favor the Delaware side of the bay one year, and the Cape May peninsula of New Jersey the next, making population trends exceedingly difficult to determine. The watermen further point out that beach erosion, shoreline development, and global warming's rising tides all can contribute to horseshoe crab fluctuations too. Although New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland's harvest restrictions seem to have slowed the total number of horseshoe crab landings since 1996, fishermen are quickly learning to exploit the loopholes. Along the Delaware River in Pennsylvania, harbormasters who in the past rarely saw the ancient beasts on dry dock found some 75,000 horseshoe crabs entering port at Chester in 1998.