When I Discovered a New Organism
Being born and brought up in one of the busiest cities in the world, Mumbai, I never got the opportunity to connect with nature that much. Today, I released a video on my YouTube channel Seed to Life of my first time encounter with a snake. Some other person who was also there identified the snake as a copperhead snake and I easily believed it. It turned out to be a harmless rat snake. Some expert viewers corrected me and gave me the information that I was looking for. Thanks to them. But this incidence brought back a funny memory that still cracks me up.
Our first home in the US was near a beach on the east coast. The beach was never crowded. Almost every day we used to go there to walk in the sand. The water was not clear but looking at the darkening waves as the sun went down while listening to the rhythmic music of the waves was an amazing experience. Now, when we live in Texas, we are hours away from beaches. We crave to hear the sound of the waves, the sand, and that salty wind. As we stood in the water, feeling the sand escaping from under our feet, I hardly noticed any fish or crabs. Sometimes we used to see mussels and shells trying to hide in the sand as the wave washed away from the shore. In fact, some kind people used to buy mussels and put them in the sand. Possibly, they were trying to increase their population. But most of the time, the annoying seaweed or some marine plants used to wrap around our legs. I remember my son who was then a toddler was very scared of them. One day something unusual happened. We noticed a very weird creature in the sand. It was almost 10–12 inches long, circular in shape, and had a tail. We had never seen such a sea creature before in our lives. Unfortunately, it was dead. We had found a new organism we thought. It just blew our minds. The beach was quiet as usual so we couldn’t ask anyone. We took several pictures of it. The circular shell was like a crab shell but then it had very small legs compared to crabs. It had a disproportionately big head with a narrowing body that was leading to a tail that gave it almost a sting-ray-like look. We were very happy that we had witnessed something very rare. Unfortunately, it was not alive anymore. I got so excited that I wanted to share it with someone. Fifteen years back, I was hardly active on social media. I didn’t even know many people in the US. So in my life for the first time, I decided to contact some local newspapers. I don’t remember which newspapers I wrote to but I sent the pictures to at least 2–3 newspapers. I was so socially awkward back then that for me it was a brave thing to do. But the excitement of the event made me very brave that day, brave enough to be stupid. Out of those the three editors that I reached out to, two didn’t bother to respond and let me live in my happy world for a few more hours. But one of the kind editors responded. For those who still haven’t figured out what animal it was, it was a horseshoe crab. The editor told me that the pictures that I sent were of horseshoe crab (Limulidae) and they were very common near the northeast shores. I felt so embarrassed at that time but the memory of that incident still brings out some good laughs.
Now, I’m hoping that there is at least some good percentage of people in the world who have never seen horseshoe crab. At least they can relate to my feelings after they look at the pictures of the horseshoe crabs. Horseshoe crabs are mean-looking but they are totally harmless. They are in reality very cool animals to know. Here are some interesting facts about Horseshoe crabs.
- Horseshoe crabs are older than dinosaurs. They have existed for more than 445 million years.
- Even though horseshoe crabs are known as crabs they are not crabs but they are more related to spiders or arachnids than crabs. So their name is a misnomer.
- Horseshoe crabs have milky-blue blood that provides the only known natural source of limulus amebocyte lysate, a substance that detects a contaminant called endotoxin. Endotoxins are very deadly so almost all pharmaceutical companies rely on horseshoe crabs to make the vaccines and drugs safer that includes the covid vaccines. [Source] The precious blood is collected from these animals and then they are dropped back into the sea. Unfortunately, many of them do not make it after that.
- Even though horseshoe crabs are commonly seen near the shoreline, currently their population is declining due to harvesting them for food, as bait, biomedical testing, habitat loss, and coastal reclamation. The horseshoe crab that I saw was Atlantic horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), commonly known as the American horseshoe crab. There are three other species that are found in Southeast Asia. The American horseshoe crab is one of the four species of horseshoe crabs and it is listed as Vulnerable to extinction and the tri-spine horseshoe crab is classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened SpeciesTM. The two additional Asian horseshoe crab species will soon be listed on the IUCN Red List. How unfortunate is that? An organism that managed to survive for 450 million is going to disappear from the earth if we don’t make special efforts. [source]
- Horseshoe crabs have 10 eyes, a pair of compound eyes (Prosoma/ head), and then photoreceptors on the tail. Horseshoe crabs have several pairs of eyes. Two large compound eyes on the prosoma are sensitive to polarized light and can magnify sunlight 10 times. A pair of simple eyes on the forward side of the prosoma can sense ultraviolet light from the moon. In addition, multiple eye spots are located under the prosoma, with more on the underside of the tail. Horseshoe crabs occasionally swim upside down and may once have used these eyes more than they do today. [source]
- A female horseshoe crab may lay more than 100,000 eggs over several days in batches of about 4000 eggs. These eggs are valuable food resources for migratory sea birds.
