Journal of Emerging Scholarship

The horseshoe crab (HSC), Limulus polyphemus, has existed for millions of years and has undergone little structural change, giving them the name, “living fossil”. They are important as a food source for shore birds, as bait for the fishing industry, and as the source of an important component for contamination screening of medical products. A number of long-term spawning surveys have been conducted along the east coast of the United States, such as tagging to track individuals over multiple seasons to determine if they return to the same spawning sites. Genetic studies of HSC sequences have been conducted to identify variations like single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP) to understand population structure and gene flow. Studies involving HSCs from very distant locations on the east coast of the United States suggest that there is limited gene flow between regions a great distance apart. This work focuses on HSCs in the Chesapeake Bay collected from five locations, and two from the mouth of the Delaware Bay. There are indications that there is considerable genetic diversity at each site, suggesting that mating is not limited to an isolated population, and the identification of haplotypes at sites very distant from each other does suggest significant gene flow between populations. It is important to understand how much genetic diversity, or lack thereof, there is in HSC population along the Atlantic coast. This has implications for regional management and ensuring a healthy and diverse population.