History of horseshoe crabs

• Main Author: Nur Mus'Ifah Mustafah
• Other Authors: Miles Alexander Powell
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
• Subjects: Humanities::History
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/155920
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This paper delves into the different purposes for which people have captured horseshoe crabs and examines how these harvests – and other human activities in the age of the Anthropocene – have propelled the decline of horseshoe crabs populations. This study examines Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand. It considers the factors that caused the horseshoe crab population to decline, drawing on a broad range of sources, including personal interviews, newspaper articles, the law acts, international conservation data, and secondary sources such as journal articles and books. Throughout the research, urbanisation, overfishing, and overconsumption are the key factors affecting the horseshoe crabs population in Southeast Asia. This thesis contends that humans are crucially significant in affecting the horseshoe crab population in good and bad ways. Humans are responsible for restoring the horseshoe crab population in the wild and adopting synthetic Amoebocyte Lysate in biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. Also, this work argues that the natural environmental variability such as foreign species invasion can affect the horseshoe crab population.