After short block, horseshoe crab harvest on SC wildlife refuge allowed to continue again

Nine days after a federal judge ordered that the harvest of horseshoe crabs from the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge would be prohibited this year as a lawsuit about the legality of the activity proceeds, a different federal court ordered that the harvest can continue for the time being.

Charles River Laboratories, the sole company that purchases horseshoe crabs from along the S.C. coast to produce a pharmaceutical testing product from their blood in Charleston, appealed Judge Bruce Hendrick’s order shortly after she issued it to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. While the appeal is considered, fishermen will be allowed to collect horseshoe crabs on Cape Romain for Charles River to purchase, that court decided at the direction of Judge Steven Agee.

In a statement, Charles River said the company was pleased the court had ruled in its favor.

Two environmental nonprofits, the Southern Environmental Law Center and Defenders of Wildlife, filed the lawsuit in October against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. They allege that the federal agency is breaking laws meant to protect wildlife by allowing the harvest of horseshoe crabs on the refuge without first having studied whether that commercial activity is damaging the ecosystem.

The harvest should be paused until that evaluation is done since the activity is causing irreparable harm to a delicately coordinated environmental event, they said. Every year, flocks of thousands of threatened migratory birds, called red knots, stop in Cape Romain in the spring to re-fuel on nutrient-dense horseshoe crab eggs and other food before they continue north. Their almost 10,000-mile journey from the bottom of South America to the top of the Arctic coincides every year with the annual spawning season of horseshoe crabs in South Carolina.

The crabs mate and lay eggs in the state’s coastal regions in spring and early summer when the tide is high and the moon is full. Fishermen are permitted to pick up and sequester crabs from the beaches while they’re spawning, depriving red knots — whose numbers are declining — of immediate access to eggs when they briefly stop in the state. Some experts believe the bleeding process also reduces the eggs available in the long run, as following the removal of what can be as much as half of their blood volume, 20% of female crabs bled by Charles River in South Carolina die after being released back to the ocean, research shows.

“Charles River is trying desperately to hang on to its enormous profits by jeopardizing the populations of both horseshoe crabs and shorebirds like the red knot whose survival depends on the crabs’ eggs,” said SELC lawyer Catherine Wannamaker. “We’ll continue our fight to protect the wildlife at Cape Romain, and we can only hope Charles River will stop blocking national efforts to switch to a proven synthetic alternative.”

Charles River Laboratories, the office for the S.C. Attorney General, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service argue that a 1991 lease granted permission for the harvest, and that no pause is necessary.

Because of the prior lease agreement, the previous order to temporarily prohibit the harvest “rips asunder the longstanding sovereignty of the State of South Carolina in the area of tidelands and submerged lands,” wrote S.C. Attorney General Alan Wilson in a court filing that supported the reversal of the initial harvest ban.