{"id":248059,"date":"2026-07-08T12:14:41","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T16:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=248059"},"modified":"2026-07-08T12:42:46","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T16:42:46","slug":"choose-your-own-adventure-the-tagging-of-the-horseshoe-crab","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2026\/07\/choose-your-own-adventure-the-tagging-of-the-horseshoe-crab\/","title":{"rendered":"Choose Your Own Adventure: The Tagging of the Horseshoe Crab"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s already a UConn student shirtless and up to his waist in Long Island Sound when we tag our first horseshoe crab. The water is only 64 degrees Fahrenheit on this breezy June morning. Not everyone is so keen to get wet.<\/p>\n

UConn\u2019s Genome Ambassador Program and Sacred Heart University\u2019s Project Limulus teamed up to tag horseshoe crabs crawling onto the beach in Stratford on June 16. Fortunately, the crabs are all over, scrabbling along the pebbled bank near the edge of the seagrass as well as four feet deep in the rising tide. Jo-Marie Kasinak, director of Project Limulus, describes finding horseshoe crabs as a \u201cChoose Your Own Adventure\u201d experience, in which you can get as wet and muddy as you (don\u2019t) want. Some students start peeking into the large concrete reef balls high and dry on the beach, looking for horseshoe crabs that waited too long to swim out and got stuck inside during the last high tide.<\/p>\n

\"A
Horseshoe crabs being tagged during a tagging and data collection event at Stratford Point on Tuesday, June 16, 2026. (Sydney Herdle\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThe males are smaller. They use their boxing gloves to latch onto the females to swim to shore for mating,\u201d says Kasinak, referring to the specially shaped claws male horseshoe crabs have. She mentions that horseshoe crabs are not monogamous, and that in Delaware Bay one female was found with 19 males hanging onto her. It\u2019s not quite that crazy out here in this salt marsh now managed by the Audubon Society. But we\u2019ve already found one mating pair, and we\u2019re looking for more.<\/p>\n

Horseshoe crabs have scooted around Earth\u2019s coastal waters for the last 450 million years. They existed before the dinosaurs, before any land animals at all. Which probably explains why they crawl onto beaches to mate and lay eggs; land predators weren\u2019t a thing back then. Multiple epochs later, they still spend late spring and summer in and around the beaches and salt marches from Maine to Florida, then head out into deeper water for the colder months. Scientists don\u2019t know too much about what they do out there.<\/p>\n

Which is why we\u2019re out here tagging them. Crabs tagged here in Stratford are most commonly reported along nearby beaches within a five-kilometer radius, although some have traveled as far south as Florida. The actual tagging process involves picking up a crab, driving an awl into its shell far enough from the edge to avoid it sticking off the side but close enough to the edge to avoid the brain, and then shoving a tag into the hole. It\u2019s like an earring, or at least that\u2019s how the researchers describe it.<\/p>\n

\"A
Jay Podziewski \u201927 (CLAS) draws blood from a horseshoe crab, which is blue in color, for his Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF) grant research at Stratford Point on Tuesday, June 16, 2026. (Sydney Herdle\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When the awl goes in, most crabs bleed a little. Their blood is pale blue, and goes for more than $60,000 per gallon in the pharmaceutical industry. It\u2019s used to test the cleanliness and sterility of vaccines and certain medical equipment, clotting immediately upon encountering the slightest contamination.<\/p>\n

The crabs are picked up on mid-Atlantic beaches during mating season, bled, and then returned to the beaches weakened. Some of them manage to mate and lay eggs and survive, but some don\u2019t, and the blood harvest is contributing to the decline in horseshoe crab numbers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is a synthetic product made in yeast\u201d to replace horseshoe crab blood, \u201cbut a lot of companies don\u2019t trust it,\u201d says Jay Podziewski ’27 (CLAS). The undergraduate molecular biology major is doing a Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF) project this summer experimenting with how to grow horseshoe crab amoebocytes\u2014the cells in the blood that clot to reveal bacterial contamination\u2014in the lab. If scientists can figure out how to grow them in the lab instead of in a crab, they might be able to produce a product much closer to real horseshoe crab blood than the current yeast synthetic. \u201cIf we\u2019re successful, it should have an easier time getting approved,\u201d Podziewski says. And fewer crabs would need to be bled.<\/p>\n

UConn marine genomicist Kate Castellano is Podziewski\u2019s advisor on the project. She was on the team at UConn\u2019s Institute for Systems Genomics that sequenced the horseshoe crab\u2019s genetic code<\/a>, publishing it in 2025<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are multiple factors in the horseshoe crab\u2019s blood that cause the clotting,\u201d Castellano says. Since the synthetic product produced by yeast was using only a single gene to produce a single clotting factor, \u201cmaybe it wasn\u2019t working as well as it could because it was missing factors,\u201d she says. Podziewski\u2019s project will create a tool to better understand the biology of the cells, and see whether these other factors are required to make the test more sensitive.<\/p>\n

One of the students manages to dig a small male horseshoe crab out of a reef pot, where he had buried himself to keep his gills moist during the last low tide. He is promptly tagged and released. Then two students walk over with a mating pair. The female is large. She has a hole in her shell, and is missing a few claws, but she\u2019s carrying loads of eggs and has very light-colored eyes, a sign of relative health and youth. The researchers try to figure out if the hole in her shell is from a previous tagging or not.<\/p>\n

\"A
Horseshoe crabs being tagged during a tagging and data collection event at Stratford Point on Tuesday, June 16, 2026. (Sydney Herdle\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThis seemed like a super cool way to experience field work in a different field,\u201d says Jillian Taormina, taking a break from crab hunting. Taormina is doing a stint of post baccalaureate research on human genomics in Deborah Bolnick\u2019s lab at UConn before moving on to graduate study at the University of Maine Farmington this fall. \u201cIt\u2019s fascinating to see how different fields interact; I can definitely take some of this with me,\u201d Taormina says.<\/p>\n

The salt marsh we\u2019re standing on was formerly owned by Remington Arms, which used it as a shooting range at one point. Later Dupont bought Remington, and tried to environmentally remediate the property, but reminders of the past still emerge from the muck on a regular basis. This writer found a piece of a clay pigeon, still painted safety orange. UConn multimedia specialist Syd Herdle picked up some shot casings as well as a discarded drone, a decidedly more modern piece of garbage.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s reassuring that even in this imperfectly repaired environment, the crabs still come and breed. All in all, the students tag 17 horseshoe crabs in two hours, and numerous other breeding pairs are spied but elude the researchers.<\/p>\n

Other creatures come, too. A birder stopping by to catch glimpses of shorebirds walks over and asks what we\u2019re doing, and whether she can help. Anyone can volunteer. The interested can check out Project Limulus<\/a> or join in other UConn Genome Ambassador<\/a> projects to learn more about horseshoe crabs, genetics and the scientific process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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