Jason Morris, Ph.D., professor and chair of Natural Sciences, said the honor is fitting, noting Botton “literally edited the book on horseshoe crabs.” Botton has been studying the crabs since the 1970s and is considered an expert internationally. Not only has he published extensively about the crabs in numerous scientific papers, his research has also been tailored to inform policymakers on how to proceed with beach replenishment projects in a manner that aims to balance the needs of the crabs with those of humans. He is a co-editor of Changing Global Perspectives on Horseshoe Crab Biology, Conservation and Management (Springer, 2015). He also co-chairs the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Horseshoe Crab Specialist Group.

The horseshoe crab fossil received its new name via a paper written by Russell D. C. Bicknell, Ph.D., a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, and Stephan Pates, Ph.D., of Harvard University’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, which appeared in the journal Scientific Reports. In an email from Australia, Bicknell called Botton “an exceptional colleague.”

Botton said the honor took him totally by surprise.

“The naming of the species for me was out of nowhere; I had no inkling that a new species had been found, much less that they decided to name it after me,” he said, adding that he was very flattered.

Horseshoe crabs alive today are very similar to their ancient cousins, leading many to call them “living fossils.”

“The term ‘living fossils’ depicts the idea that you have an animal which has undergone rare, relatively little morphological change over one period of time,” Botton said.

While they may have changed little over hundreds of millions of years, that does not mean the staying power of horseshoe crabs is assured for millions of years to come.  Botton noted that the American horseshoe crab is officially listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of endangered and threatened species.

“There are populations that are relatively healthy, but in New England and in the south of Florida, the populations are small and considered to be more at risk,” he said. “We also recently completed a revision of the status of the so-called tri-spine horseshoe crab,” he said.

The tri-spine is also known as the Chinese horseshoe crab in China and the Japanese horseshoe crab in Japan. He said scientists must be careful what they call that species, so as to not offend the Chinese by calling it the Japanese horseshoe crab, or vice versa.

“We (the international scientific community) decided to go with an older, more neutral name of tri-spine horseshoe crab; that way everybody’s happy,” he said, unwittingly noting the importance in a name. “That’s why I prefer to use the Latin names, but most people don’t.”

Regardless of the name one chooses, the tri-spine species is now listed as endangered, due to the crabs’ use for medical purposes and for food. The rise of sea level and the loss of spawning habitat pose another, broader threat.

“A lot of areas that used to be beaches where horseshoe crabs could lay eggs have now been developed either for industry, housing, or where they put up sea walls, all of which all take away the spawning habitat,” he said.

Here in the United States, the dangers to American horseshoe crabs come from fisheries that chop the crabs up and put them in traps that are used to catch eels and whelks, he said. Also in the U.S., the crabs’ blue blood is harvested for medicinal purposes, but that only accounts for a mere 10 to 15% mortality loss of the crabs caught for that purpose.

“They don’t bleed them bone dry. Just like when you go to give blood, they don’t take everything out of you. They want the animal to survive. So, there’s some stress due to handling and taking them out of water and so forth. But the estimates of the blood-related mortality are much less than the direct mortality from using them as bait,” he said.

Though he is personally concerned with the fate of the crabs, he said he doesn’t opine on conservation matters in his classes which are part of the Environmental Science Program he co-directs. Instead, he simply presents the science and lets students draw their own conclusions.

“When I’m in class I don’t try to steer a conversation in a particular direction. These can be viewed as political issues. I think some of the students almost want me to be more opinionated, but I don’t feel it’s my place. I feel it’s my place to give them the facts and let them judge.”

Nevertheless, he said his students talk to each other all the time about environmental issues and they tend to be “a pretty passionate group.”

“I mean, it’s hard to ignore what’s going on outside of the classroom right now,” he said.

Plum Beach, a spit of land sandwiched between Jamaica Bay and the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, will never be mistaken for Coney Island or the Rockaways. Its amenities are few, there is no access to mass transportation, and the sand is littered with untold detritus from the sea.

It’s also heaven for Limulus polyphemus, aka the Atlantic horseshoe crab.

On a recent afternoon at high tide, three teams of researchers led by Fordham biology professor Mark Botton, Ph.D., waded into the waters of the bay and methodically plucked one of the oldest animal species in the world from the surf. Armed with measuring tape, calipers, and notebooks, they recorded data such as the size of the crab’s carapace, its sex, and whether it had seaweed, barnacles, or slipper shells on it.

The crabs had come to the beach to mate, just as they have been doing for an estimated 450 million years. Clumps of as many as a dozen crabs crowded around each other, occasionally flipping over when a high wave swept in.

Botton, who grew up in nearby Midwood, has been coming to Plum Beach since 2011, shortly after the south side of the beach was replenished to alleviate severe erosion. The north side, which is slightly more protected from the Atlantic Ocean, was never rebuilt, and as such, it is where the crabs gather. Since global warming is expected to cause seas to rise in the future, Botton said beach replenishment projects will become more common.

“All things being equal, if you have a choice of what kind of sand to put on the beach, it makes a difference for the crabs. We’d like to be able to inform future policy, because if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it in a way that provides a maximum benefit for wildlife, as well as people,” he said.

Horseshoe crabs play a vital part in the ecosystem as predators of small fish and mollusks, and also as prey for migrating shore birds that feast on their eggs. Their blood is also used by pharmaceutical companies to test cancer drugs.

Karine Khoder, a rising Fordham College at Lincoln Center (FCLC) senior from Bay Ridge who is concentrating on organismal biology with the goal of attending medical school, also said that their fearsome appearance belies the fact that they’re utterly harmless to humans.

“You can stick your fingers all up in their claws, and they won’t do anything; they’re not strong enough to hurt you,” she said.

“It’s cool to see the crabs are relatively the same as they were hundreds of millions of years ago. I think that’s impressive. They’re doing something right.”

Khoder accompanied Botton, along with fellow FCLC classmate Adam Aly, who grew up in Flushing, Queens, and became familiar with the crabs when he worked as a lifeguard in the Rockaways. Like Khoder, he hopes the research he’s conducting on the crabs this summer will help him gain admission to medical school.

Christina Colon, FCRH 99, assistant professor of biology at Kingsborough Community College, also brought several students for the count.

“It’s not just the crabs. Students see migratory birds they’ve never seen before, sharks, sea turtles, stingrays—these are things that they don’t get to see firsthand,” she said.

“It changes the way they look at New York, the way they look at nature, and the way they look at their ability to do real science.”

After a few hours of counting, the three teams dug into the sand to harvest some eggs. They evaluated 300 crabs in total, and, as expected, they encountered roughly four males for every female. That’s because females, which are larger, tend to burrow into the sand, release eggs, and then depart, while the smaller males visit the shore at every high tide.

The population of Limulus polyphemus is healthy in this part of the country, said Botton, but they’re still a great research focus.

“To have science students develop a small project on their own that they can take ownership of, and take pride in, is a really important part of the learning experience at Fordham,” he said.

“We want to encourage them to get involved in research, and understand that it isn’t just performing a cookbook recipe out of a lab manual. At some point, you have to sit down and think about ‘what would I like to demonstrate, and how can I test this hypothesis, get data, work with the data, and eventually give a presentation.’”
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