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An incomplete analysis.

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Niles and colleagues (2009) do not present all of the data relevant to the issues they address in the article they wrote for BioScience. They reference unnamed sources for pre-1997 horseshoe crab harvest to conclude that recent harvest exceeds historic harvest. In fact, reported landings from New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia in 2006 (352 metric tons [mt]) were between landings in 1989 (365 mt) and 1990 (232 mt) ( www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/st1/commercial/ index.html), despite nonmandatory reporting coastwide before 1998 (Kreamer and Michels 2009). They present egg densities from New Jersey beaches only. Of the 11 Delaware beaches sampled, eggs in the top 5 centimeters exceeded their monitoring target of 50,000 per square meter at 5 in 2006 and at 6 in 2007 (Kalasz et al. 2008). They rely on the Delaware trawl survey for historic trends. Nine fishery-independent surveys have been used to assess trends in the Delaware Bay region, and several began before 1990 (Smith et al. 200%).

Niles and colleagues do not consider the full scope of harvest controls that have been implemented. Harvest regulations in Delaware Bay starting in the late 1990s--including harvest quotas, seasonal closures, male-only harvest, use of bait-saving devices, and establishment of a 3885-square-kilometer no-take sanctuary--have been followed by population stabilization and increase (Smith et al. 2009a). Recent data indicate that horseshoe crab abundance has increased from a low reached in 2003-2004 following a pattern that fits the predicted demographics of a recovering population due to sex-specific maturity (Hata and Hallerman 2009, Smith et al. 2009b).

Niles and colleagues overstate the certainty of...

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