Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I write about biodiversity and the hidden quirks of the natural world. With copper-blue blood prized by modern medicine and a body ...

An enzyme in the blue blood has been key to testing vaccines since the 1980s, raising concerns for the crabs’ population. But regulatory approval and new data are signaling the tide may be turning ...

SINGAPORE – Its head looks like a helmet, it has a long spike for a tail, and its blood is literally blue. If you spot these distinctive features of a horseshoe crab in Singapore, a research project ...

Horseshoe crab populations in Rhode Island have not rebounded in 25 years despite restoration efforts. The crabs are harvested as bait for fishermen, and their blood is used to test for bacterial ...

Now that New York State has approved a phased-in ban on the harvest of horseshoe crabs for bait and medical uses, fishermen who harvest or use the species to trap whelk and eels say it’s imperative ...

Environmentalists are suing the federal government over what they say is a failure to protect the horseshoe crab, a prehistoric-looking species that is important to the survival of shore birds in ...

Horseshoe crabs were crawling along the shallow sandy bottoms of Earth’s oceans 200 million years before the first dinosaurs came on the scene. But some populations have declined dramatically with the ...

Deborah Cramer is an adviser to the Massachusetts Horseshoe Crab Collaborative and author of “The Narrow Edge: A Tiny Bird, An Ancient Crab, and an Epic Journey.” Have you ever been vaccinated against ...