Chinese horseshoe crab news

vogelcommando said:
Bad news to begin with :( : the Chinese horseshoe was placed in March 2019 by the IUCN on the Endangered List :

After 450M Years, Chinese Horseshoe Crab is Now Endangered
Click to expand...

Do any Western zoos keep this taxa? I would imagine that, after the cost of importation, it'd be fairly easy and cheap to establish a captive breeding program for this species given the popularity of horseshoe crab touch pools in zoos/aquariums. This is assuming, of course, that the Atlantic Horseshoe Crabs currently used are captive bred and not wild-caught, I don't really know much about horseshoe crab breeding in captivity.

EDIT: I see the article says that hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs have been captive bred for release in the wild.

~Thylo
 
ThylacineAlive said:
Do any Western zoos keep this taxa? I would imagine that, after the cost of importation, it'd be fairly easy and cheap to establish a captive breeding program for this species given the popularity of horseshoe crab touch pools in zoos/aquariums. This is assuming, of course, that the Atlantic Horseshoe Crabs currently used are captive bred and not wild-caught, I don't really know much about horseshoe crab breeding in captivity.

EDIT: I see the article says that hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs have been captive bred for release in the wild.
Click to expand...
I had always imagined that aquarium animals were wild-caught. I'd be surprised if they were captive-bred for the aquariums actually. Note that the captive-bred animals mentioned in the article were simply released as larvae and survival rates were entirely unknown which suggests they simply collected eggs from spawning females and dumped them out in the ocean upon hatching, which is not the same as captive-breeding, especially with the goal of creating captive stocks for conservation purposes.

However, having said that, all species of horseshoe crabs have been maintained and bred successfully in lab conditions. The link below is to an abstract, but underneath it is a series of quotes from other papers which will give the gist of successes (seemingly limited, but certainly making it possible for conservation breeding to be pursued).

E.g. this quote is interesting: ''Horseshoe crabs are easy to rear, and it is particularly easy to rear them to the early juvenile stages (French 1979 ;Brown and Clapper 1981 ;Carmichael et al. 2009; Schreibman and Zarnoch 2009; Carmichael and Brush 2012). This means that the animals used by the aquaria trade could come from captive rearing"

https://www.researchgate.net/public...of_conditions_for_captive_growth_and_survival
 
Chlidonias said:
I had always imagined that aquarium animals were wild-caught. I'd be surprised if they were captive-bred for the aquariums actually. Note that the captive-bred animals mentioned in the article were simply released as larvae and survival rates were entirely unknown which suggests they simply collected eggs from spawning females and dumped them out in the ocean upon hatching, which is not the same as captive-breeding, especially with the goal of creating captive stocks for conservation purposes.

However, having said that, all species of horseshoe crabs have been maintained and bred successfully in lab conditions. The link below is to an abstract, but underneath it is a series of quotes from other papers which will give the gist of successes (seemingly limited, but certainly making it possible for conservation breeding to be pursued).

E.g. this quote is interesting: ''Horseshoe crabs are easy to rear, and it is particularly easy to rear them to the early juvenile stages (French 1979 ;Brown and Clapper 1981 ;Carmichael et al. 2009; Schreibman and Zarnoch 2009; Carmichael and Brush 2012). This means that the animals used by the aquaria trade could come from captive rearing"

https://www.researchgate.net/public...of_conditions_for_captive_growth_and_survival
Click to expand...

Well the article does say that the Guangxi Ocean Institute "has developed a captive breeding programme". It does say they released hundreds of thousands of "hatchlings", though, so maybe it is catching and releasing larvae.

~Thylo
 
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