This was in Cape Henlopen Delaware. The temperature had been very hot over this weekend so maybe that was a factor? Is this normal?
Hundreds of dead horseshoe crabs lay belly up on the beach in Delaware
Wait Kevin Durant did this?
EasyMoneySniper
Yeah I saw him do this once. His incredibly long arms and legs helped him murder multiple at a time. It was a sight to see.
That’s amazing. He the real mvp of crab killing
That's some sideshow Bob level shit right there.
NO WAY - I’ve suspected this for a very long time.
I don't miss Red Tide 🤢
cough me either
This happens in Cape May, NJ.
Grand ma Lives in North Cape May, one block from the Bay. Every summer visiting, I got to see these guys. I even got a tattoo of one.
Just across the Delaware River from Cape Henlopen, of course
Apparently their blood is used for medicine and they are supposed to be unharmed when released into the sea afterwards…
They found that many actually had premature deaths from this practice. The crabs are not able to recover enough from the blood loss to be able to thrive back in the wild. I live here and have never seen them all upside down like this. It seems like they were caught by an unexpected wave and washed ashore while swimming and got stuck?
Pretty sure they die after mating. This is the remains of a horseshoe crab orgy.
I mean I’ve witnessed that a million times, but I’ve never seen them all upside down like this. Usually it’s just random bodies all over the place lol.
That makes me mad.
U know what the cause was?
No, it must be our fault
They die copulating so it’s cool.
Kumakazi
Pour one out for all the fallen men
Death by snu snu?
Basically. The males are smaller. They latch on to the females at night to spawn. Then often they die of exhaustion or get turned over and die out of water. Nothing to do with the weather. Just the life cycle of 440 million year old water bug. They’re not actually even a crustacean.
TIL I am a 440 myo water bug
When you stop posting on Reddit we'll know that you finally got laid.
I feel like one necessitates the other though
They’re not actually even a crustacean.
Yup. Closer to spiders, phylogenetically.
Close to roaches phobiagenetically.
Do people eat them
Their blood is harvested by big pharma
For blood thinners, I think?
No, for a very unique biochemical property that allows drug and vax manufacturers to check for bacterial contamination. They're kinda the foundation of modern pharmaceutical science, because otherwise we couldn't trust injectables at all.
Believe they’ve gone away from it with an engineered substance now.
Not really. Some labs still purchase endotoxin detection kits with LAL
Something like that…..it’s blue and it’s worth an absolute ton of money.
For an antigen that detects bacteria, pretty sure.
Neat! I was terrified of them as a kid. Every other summer we went to Lewes, DE. This was common at the bay beach we went to for years. Ugh I hated them. We'd play Dodge the Horse Shoe Crab, running all over the the beach leaping and dodging over them.
I used to take care of juveniles in a lab. We would monitor their movements. The babies would play and jump off of the dividers upside down. It appeared to be intentional with no reason. They would just keep repeating it. It was so endearing.
Aw I love this!
Hermit crabs don’t die when they mate. Edit: Horseshoe - Limulus Polyphemus.
They live a long time - like decades, I’m sure many do because of predators but this is a massacre. Maybe they had a civil war?
More like an orgy.
They were probably drunk on fermented clams.
Civil orgy
I don't get it. If they die naturally on the beach why are they trying to protect them from pharma researchers harvesting them for blood?
They die of exhaustion or from getting turned over.
There is a question of ethics when you’re farm raising a creature strictly for its blood.
They def don’t like heat but they had to mate. Choices were made. Hopefully they laid eggs.
where do they lay eggs? not in the sand?
At the waterline after digging a hole. You can see fine sand in circles around mating time and they will be in there.
how is this one of the most successfully adapted species reproduction strategy?
I think as far as evolution goes, if Its not broken don’t fix it. Lol. I have no idea. They have been this was for 400 million years or so. The eggs are food for a lot of creatures. They lay a large cluster of what appears to be hundreds of eggs per hermit crab.
not enough. those are rookie numbers!
Yeah I looked it up, Wikipedia states thousands. I can’t imagine one does that much.
Maybe per lifetime. I have not read the source paper or plan to.
Gulls come and eat tons of the eggs.
At high tide, pretty sure.
I lie in bed everyday with my hands up too
Fun story, they burry themselves and if they cant, they sleep upside down. Especially in captivity.
I take your hint, gonna bury myself soon
Isn’t their blood blue, and super expensive? Grab a bucket and get to work Op
I wouldn’t advise that. They need to be alive for it to be effective but also the legality of the blood collection is a very grey area right now.
You want to juice them? You sicko. /s
Gotta get to picking while the juice is still fresh
Sippin’ on gin and juice.. laid back.
Got my mind on my money, and my money on my mind
Sippin on apple juice, laid back With my mind on my mommy and my mommy on my mind
toddler version
Beats Mountain Dew.
Their blood is used for endotoxin testing in vaccine production. It clots in the presence of certain endotoxins.
It’s crazy how people figure things out that seem so random
Someone made a ritualistic pile of them into the shape of a pyramid, quite grotesque
I have nipples, Bobvila274, would you milk me?
I have cold and coarse hands
I'd let Bob Vila milk me
Yes and they are being over harvested for it It's a real problem
$15k per quart.
Probably how they got that way
The blood is valuable but I can’t remember why. Who out there knows the answer?
Yes, thanks.
It's used in medicine for what I dont remember but it's one of the more essential ones iirc
Yeah I bet it's one of those they have to be alive for it to be at all useful. I imagine it becomes nasty very quickly after the creatures immune system goes offline.
Is it legal? I know there's some weird thing with collecting ambergris so I don't know if there's a weird thing about collecting these guys blood.
It's over 50k a gallon
It is, because it's used for bacterial endotoxin testing!
Unnecessarily too... That's a US FDA thing. Europe has synthetic alternatives that have been in use for years...oh yeah, and they're cheaper and not cruel.
Easy there killer, no need to beat a dead horse.
*dead Horseshoe Crab
I went to Delaware once. It was about 25 years ago and the same thing happened but at the time my brother had a black hat he NEVER took off (it looked like it too) and he lost it in the ocean and was just panicking trying to find his hat but kept picking up horseshoe crabs instead
That's hilarious. I would have loved.to watch him desperately trying to find his hat, just to pick up a crab. Nope, not that one either!
My mom was laughing, my brother was nearly crying (don't feel bad though he was like 19 and my mom said the hats the reason he's bald now) and I'm freaking out bc I'd never seen a horseshoe crabs and I don't understand why my mom thinks it's funny my brothers about to get eaten by them! Lol
Your mom is fuckin awesome lmao
crab rave went too hard
I went to Dewey Beach as a kid, it was late spring. There were 100’s of horseshoe crabs all over the place.
Yeah I used to vacation in Rehoboth and it always seemed like there were way more dead horseshoe crabs than the NJ beaches I was used to.
In east Hampton they have a similar situation. I remember I was a kid walking along the beach there and as far as the eye could see were horseshoe crabs laying on their backs like this. We were supposed to go kayaking and I was like 10 years old and trying to “man up” so I dragged my kayak behind me. Ever afraid of squishing one and getting hermit crab juice on the kayak, or worse - one accidentally making its way into the kayak and me not noticing till we’re out in the water.
I think about how many there were pretty often. It’s one of those things where once you have the picture in your head, it stays in your head forever.
I just spent two hours reading about horseshoe crabs. Thanks.
Saw this on my trip to DE last summer. Happy to know it’s a natural occurrence. I thought it was a result of that medical bleeding thing they do to them.
This happens yearly no need for alarm
Poor babies. They give mating *everything* they've got!
Man, the crab people are gonna be pissed about this.
That pic could be half a billion years old.
They died of boredom. Delaware.... I'm in ... Delaware....
I can vouch for that.
Not really weird on the east coast at the shore.
They watched Biden at the debate.
Their blood is gold
What amazed me in learning about these guys is that it's actually kinda hard to tell a dead one from one that simply molted. The tell-tale is a thin, lateral slit across the front. Otherwise, a dead one looks basically the same as a molt. I have a molt that I picked up off a beach in Virginia and have a hard time convincing people it's not actually the dead body! All of the details are there - the shell, the gills, the film on the eyes - for all intents and purposes, it just looks like an entire, incredibly complex body. But nope, easily confused with just a molt. Obviously during mating season it's more likely a dead one, sadly, but not necessarily.
They took Biden’s performance yesterday /way/ too seriously.
This is nothing. I’ve waded through Delaware beaches (granted, I was 8-years-old) that were knee deep with horseshoe crabs
Horseshoe crabs can die during spawning due to high waves that overturn them and make it difficult for them to right themselves (AI)
Was that slaughter beach? Looks like about sunrise
Scientist: Quick! Take their blood!
Kafkaesque
I’ve seen movies that start this way
Honestly, same.
L Ron Hubbard is returning!!!
Drank the kool aid
Well Watson - it appears we have a HorseShoe Crab SERIAL KILLER on the loose!!
Super normal. When I was a kid in the 80s my parents would drag us to the ocean side of Delaware and there would be tons of horseshoe crabs all over the sand. To this day horseshoe crabs freak me out.
Maybe they listened to the debate.
They saw the presidential debate and no longer wanted to be associated with Biden and his state 😂
check out slaughter beach sometime- when I was a kid it was like a horshoe crab graveyard. They would go to spawn and die on the beach. Pretty pungent
Now knowing what their blood is worth, it's pretty incredible seeing them rotting by the thousands
Funny story about Slaughter Beach…. Freshly stationed in Dover and me and couple of brand new Airmen decide, “Let’s got to the beach!!!” …. So we bought a twelve pack of Bud and headed south…. “There’s a beach” ….. Slaughter Beach. This was way before there was a google to ask, ‘what’s the best beach 🏖️ n Delaware’ …. Boy were we surprised. It’s a beach all right - a beach full of dead ‘something er other’ …couldn’t google lense, either ….wasn’t until later when the locals told us and were laughing their asses off at us.😂😂😂
Yup, an ex and I visited there once because we were young and dumb and thought the name was funny. We were the only ones there besides the tons of dead horseshoe crabs. It was kind of eerie and weird. But we had a fun time trying to see if any of the crabs were still alive. We found a few live ones and put them back in the ocean. Who knows if that was the right thing to do, but at the time we thought we were saving them haha.
Thanks Biden.
Is this from the labs that take their blood and release them? There havent been any major studies as to their survival rate after.
Horseshoe crabs molt. These aren’t dead, it’s the old shell.
They watched the debate last night and just gave up.
They watched Joe Biden’s debate.
Explains the debate
It's like this all over the bay this time of year. I I've been to kitts hummock during this and... the smell
Just Death Stranding. No big deal.
I was just in Delaware and saw this too. Huge area near ocean city filled with very stinky dying horse shoe crabs.
Just sunbathing.
Breed 'n die
:(
You uhh... you wanna split it?
Is that slaughter beach?
Looks like the point at cape Henlopen on the bay side to me.
Are they yummy?
They’re just sunbathing, leave them alone.
They’re sleeping
N
Icky.
Ɔɹɐq
Done shot their wad.
No money for food because of summer sales on steam.
They come up to the shore to lay eggs. Some get trampled. For some, they’re old. There may be hundreds dead, but hundreds of thousands crawled up on that beach, so the loss is negligible
When its all gone tits up..
How sad.
That’s so very sad.
I remember this happening when I was a child.
Trilobites be wilin’
Eh. I'd say that species had a good run.
One scent you won’t find at Young Living essential oils…..
For one of the oldest creatures on this plant that survived everything, that isn’t good.
We just returned from Hilton Head and it was somewhat similar to this except it was cannonball jellyfish all up and down the beach- the ones that don't sting.
Quick, harvest their blood!
Do the go there to die on instinct at the end of their life or is it something else?
Maybe because of the mass bleeding and rerelease? We harvest their blue blood then drop them back out in the ocean- likely weaker.
I'm happy to see so many of them. Growing up in NY, I used to see them out on the beach in Queens. I went back about 5/6 years ago, and there was not one prehistoric armored beach ray in sight.
Hope they sired many baby armored beach rays
I HATE THOSE THINGS
Leave them alone they’re tanning
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Normal. Lived in Tampa just across from the bay and this was an every year thing... hundred and hundreds kd them.