LOWER TOWNSHIP, N.J. — September 27, 2014 — Six thousand baby horseshoe crabs are making their way in the waters near Cape May this weekend, thanks to a Rutgers University center that grows and releases them into the wild.
The New Jersey Aquaculture Innovation Center released the hatchlings, each tinier than a child's fingernail, into the Cape May Canal on Friday.
The center has released 250,000 of the young crabs over the past two years.
"I like to consider this a Head Start program for horseshoe crabs," said Mike DeLuca, senior associate director of the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences. "There is a 90 percent mortality rate for these crabs once they get into the wild. The crabs lay millions of eggs, but not many survive to become adult crabs."
Enter the aquaculture center, which grows not only horseshoe crabs, but oysters and mummichog, a bait fish.
It's part of an effort to replenish the population of horseshoe crabs, which is under pressure from habitat loss, commercial fishing that uses them as bait for whelk and eels (New Jersey prohibits harvesting them but neighboring Delaware does not), pollution and poachers.
But it's also intended to spur economic development in southern New Jersey, where Delaware Bay is home to the largest horseshoe crab population in the world.
Read the full story from the New Jersey Herald