We assembled occurrence records (presence-only) for all four horseshoe crab species in Asia and Eastern America from our own observations, collaborators, scientific networks as well as through publishing a scratchpad site at http://horseshoecrabs.myspecies.info/. For many species, numerous distribution records exist in the literature, and we manually Geo-referenced additional occurrence data from these sources.
Our knowledge on global distribution of the four extant horseshoe crab species is inadequate. The aim of this study (and the associated data set) is to improve our understanding of the current biogeographic distribution of horseshoe crabs. To do this we collated all available occurrence information for all four species on the Atlantic coasts of Central and North America, and the coasts of South-East Asia. Occurrence data from the four extant species of horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus, Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda, Tachypleus gigas, and T. tridentatus) were compiled from recent literature, our scientific network, and own field work. The three Asian species C. rotundicauda, T. gigas and T. tridentatus were found to co-occur on the Indonesian islands Borneo and Java.
GBIF url: https://www.gbif.org/dataset/86c1974b-04c1-49c4-8652-954fc8d30d4b
Homepage: http://horseshoecrabs.myspecies.info/
Citation: Vestbo, Stine; Obst, Matthias; Quevedo Fernandez, Francisco; Intanai, Itsara; Funch, Peter; (2017): Horseshoe crab distribution records from East America and Asia. https://doi.org/10.14284/293 accessed via GBIF.org on 2026-02-12.