(Credit: Courtesy photo)
For decades, Suffolk County resident John T. Tanacredi has been a crusader for the survival of horseshoe crabs. He is a world expert on the creatures.
He was speaking last week before Long Island Metro Business Action about the plight of horseshoe crabs, concerned about their potential extinction after 455 million years. They predate dinosaurs, he noted, by more than 200 million years.
And they could be “on the cusp of going over the cliff of evolutionary extinction,” Mr. Tanacredi told the business group in a Zoom presentation Friday.
Beyond being an ancient component of the natural environment, horseshoe crabs are “critical to humanity, notably for the health of people,” he emphasized. Indeed, the title of his talk was “Humanity & the Horseshoe Crab.” They have been indispensable in the testing of vaccinations for COVID-19. “All these inoculations need to be batch sampled,” he said.