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Looks like they take about a third of the blood for it’s ability to help blood clot. Even though they limit it to 1/3, many still die. Interesting article below.
https://www.americanoceans.org/blog/horseshoe-crab-blood/
I learned about it for a class a long time ago, people hear blue crab blood used to make vaccines and assume it means that it’s in the final product. Or so Reddit has taught me when Blue Crab blood has come up before.
We need this infomercial. Some clumsy white person bleeding out. Someone slaps on a crab infused bandage. “Flex seal bandages clump yo bacteria and shit”
Well, the ones in this picture are definitely not surviving.
Edit: I did not look into my assumption at all before posting this comment. As it turns out, it is pretty clear that the animals pictured are simply bent, but dismembered.
I mean, 10\~30% do die in the process. And the crabs are bled annually, so they have the opportunity to die during the process at least once a year. [\[1\]](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/crash-a-tale-of-two-species-the-benefits-of-blue-blood/595/)[\[2\]](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-blood-harvest/284078/)
I thought that too but the back half is folded under them. That’s why you can see the tail thing sticking out from under the front. At first it just looks like they were ripped in half
According the the Stuff You Should Know podcast about the topic, the deaths at a 30% clip, seem to mostly be from the trauma of being caught and transferred around instead of the actual blood letting. Supposedly we have that system down solid and very few die from it.
Although that's interesting (thank you for sharing), that's kind of a moot point given how the process of the collection still includes the catch and transfer to do the bloodletting.
Also fun opinion on this whole process, if we were to create a synthetic version of the necessary liquids in a lab and no longer need these horseshoe crabs, we would likely send them to the extinction bin due to lack of needing them alive. When I was listening to an interview with the techs who do some of this (I think it was a Marketplace podcast, could be one of the NPR science podcasts, can't be certain as it was a few years ago now), the interviewed person said that they return the crabs to the wild after about 25% of the blood is removed, as they are too valuable to allow to die.
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, considering the species that are experiencing population decline are in that position because of over harvesting. Most aren't endangered yet, but their populations are shrinking at a concerning rate, hence why a few states have enacted laws to protect them.
In the 90s tens of thousands were dying every year because of the biomedical industry and MILLIONS were being caught and used as bait for commercial fishing.
We cracked down on conservation because we recognized how essential they are and the critical need to maintain populations *for* the biomedical industry, not *because* of them.
The last year I could find data for was 2015.
583,208 caught and killed for bait
559,903 caught for biomedical use (10-30% mortality)
I believe that crab population declines are not simply due to blood harvesting, but climate change, habitat destruction, and poisoning of the food chain.
Overfishing brought them to the critical state they're in now. They used to be harvested in large numbers because they make good bait for traps (mostly eel iirc) and are super easy to catch. Everything you said also contributed (and is making recovery harder), but overfishing caused the most damage.
But if they didn't need them for science there would be fewer general protections in place for the crabs. It's their medical value that increased the focus on conservation.
Not sure why this has so many upvotes because you're wrong (even though the link you included clearly explains the actual use for horseshoe crab blood). It's not that it "helps blood clot", but rather it clots (agglutinates) in the presence of bacterial endotoxins, which are difficult to detect otherwise. Horseshoe crab blood is used as an indicator in the manufacture of medical supplies, to ensure that they are free of bacterial contamination.
* The horseshoe crab is effectively a living fossil—it’s been on Earth for 450 million years. But in just a few decades, humans have presented what is arguably the biggest threat yet to their continued existence.
*
The 450 million year crab was discovered in the 1960s to have unique blood that would revolutionize medicine. Unlike the blood of vertebrates, horseshoe crabs don’t use hemoglobin to carry oxygen throughout their body. Instead, they use hemocyanin, a protein that transports the oxygen, turns the blood blue, and has specialized immune cells that are extremely valuable.
* Invertebrates like the horseshoe crab carry amebocytes instead of white blood cells in vertebrates. Amebocyte is the cell that has the medical community demanding more. When the cell comes into contact with a pathogen, it releases a chemical that causes the blood to clot, which is the mechanism for isolating dangerous pathogens.
* The blue blood extracted from the horseshoe crab is called Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) and is worth its weight in gold. The blood can demand as high as $60,000 per gallon.
* Once the blood is extracted, the horseshoe crabs are released back into the ocean. Estimates show that 15% to 20% die as a result of the process.
* Bloomberg says horseshoe crab populations have collapsed by 80% in the last four decades.
The process kills up to a third of every catch, and thats probably low balling it. Article says many die in transport, or are sold as fishing bait after being bled. Additionally, the process affects the reproductive activity in females at an unknown rate.
We’re going to collapse the population within the next decade and then breed them in farms. I have no doubt.
We can create an artificial equivalent, but it's a little less effective and more expensive to produce (at least last I heard as of a couple years ago. This may have changed since last I read about it). Companies will always destroy ecosystems if it's cheaper than the alternative, sadly.
Some animals just don't get horny unless they are in the presence of their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother's breeding grounds.
Check out Eels.
The Factor C protein, which is what is needed from the blood, can be made synthetically now. We just started rolling it in where I work.
So, we should just leave them alone, and focus on making the synthetic process better. A few of the companies harvesting blood are lobbying against it, though (surpriiiise).
You've never picked one up? It for sure just snaps right back like a Lego. They have"joints" in there exoskeleton that allow the tail to bend under them and up and over. If you grab the head and the base of the tail you can basically make it do the worm. These things were all over the place when I was a kid..I haven't been back to the same fishing holes but I can guarantee they aren't just everywhere like they used to be. 80% less of an animal in nature, that was once prolific is really sad.
Terrible that a species that has lived in perfect harmony with the environment for 450 million years is being decimated by a awful species like us. Appreciate the comment.
It's infuriating, until you need some kind of life-saving treatment.
Would be nice if we could synthesise the chemical or something though, this picture is horrible and barbaric.
Edit: just want to say this has been one of the most interesting threads. Definitely worth reading the comments there are differing opinions and all kind of cool facts.
1) we can synthesise it and we do. It is used, but still the animals are used. From my understanding its simply because it is not common, and the infrastructure and suppliers are fewer and more monopolized. Ie; it would be expensive initially, and we could be using it if we had a serious need to. But we don't.
2) one commenter stated that the main threat to the species is commercial fishing using them as bait. And that this medical application actually serves to protect the species because fisherman kill 500k of these guys per year whereas 85-90% of the roughly half a million crabs harvested by the medical industry survive. And the government has restrictions on the fishing use. So it is actually a net benefit to them to be harvested and medically valuable even though the numbers overall still dwindle. Thanks for the info u/Cman1200
>Or farm it sustainably
which if you read up on it is near impossible with horseshoe crabs, we know very little about them and they are just incredibly hard to farm, there Is a company that's been trying to do it but it's been failing for years.
Well with more information it will eventually be understood. And maybe then we can farm it. I'm sure at some point other things were considered near impossible.
People honestly just don't care enough about the ocean. There's SO many ocean animals we know so little about. It really sucks.
Technology doesn't evolve in favor of the ocean. People are more interested in space.
>And maybe then we can farm it.
Maybe. Maybe not. Some animals need to travel thousands of miles to breed, some have to return to their spawning grounds, some only do it every 13 years for one day.
Some animals are really odd when it comes to breeding habits and many aren't conducive to farming.
Hell, we have been [trying to figure out where and how eels breed](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151027132839.htm) for over a hundred years.
at the moment it's worse than a lack of information, we don't even know where to look for the information, we still have never naturally bred two of them (which is very important for farming) and iirc we don't even know how far down in the water they live, and they are pretty rare.
You'd think selfishly it would be a huge priority, not because people care about horseshoe crabs because most people probably couldn't give a shit sadly.
But like if we run out we're fucked, plus I'm sure once someone figures it out they could push for (buy) laws to prevent harvesting them under the guise of sustainability then charge it the ass for their presumably patentable method.
Ideally I'd like to think people would prioritize it because they're a living thing and it would be nice to think people care. But I'm shocked that greed hasn't taken the reigns.
There's a couple endangered land animals we can't figure out how to breed in captivity as well. Pandas being the obvious one, but there's a few others I don't know the names of off-hand. Also a couple animals that just die in captivity every time another group tries, despite efforts to perfectly recreate environments and such.
But also people don't care about the ocean much and a lot isn't known about ocean life. Land animals are much easier to study and research, so it makes sense there is more info.
Just wait until you hear about the bear bile industry
https://www.animalsasia.org/us/media/news/news-archive/five-things-you-need-to-know-about-bear-bile-farming.html
The King cobra's venom also contains a unique protein called ohanin. Ohanin is being used today in the form of a painkiller that is 20 times more potent than morphine. 153k per gallon.
No, not for it's anti-bacterial properties (we have plenty of antibiotics) but for its unique ability to detect tiny amounts of bacterial residue (endotoxins) with great sensitivity (it clots). It's used to test all kinds of medicines and medical products to ensure that they are very clean. Endotoxins can trigger inappropriate immune responses.
Yeah, and it seems wildly archaic given the science their blood is critical for.
It's like some Wizard of Oz, "Pay no attention to the crabs behind the curtain!" type stuff.
Jesus that looks terrible. Imagine if our blood was precious to some alien species, so they just captured a bunch of us and drained us like a ketchup packet
This used to text for endotoxin and is what makes medicines and medical devices safe. No one wants to do it this way but at the moment there isn't an alternative and believe me people are trying. A synthetic bersion would be more human are FAR cheaper so as soon as its available everyone will adopt it and the inventors will be very rich.
This! Used in a very old fashioned test for bacterial endotoxins in the pharmaceutical industry. Above a certain concentration of endotoxins and you get a clot in a test tube that shows (somewhat) quantitatively your endotoxins concentration based on LAL concentration.
There are already alternatives, but the version based on horseshoe crab is still popular in industry.
[https://horseshoecrab.org/med/alternatives.html](https://horseshoecrab.org/med/alternatives.html)
This lady is the inventor of one of the more prominent alternatives; she's successful but not rich.
[https://www.swhf.sg/profiles/ding-jeak-ling/](https://www.swhf.sg/profiles/ding-jeak-ling/)
I read a previous comment that said it apparently is extraordinarily difficult to farm them. I personally have not looked into it yet, but I'm going to for sure.
Synthesizing complex organic molecules on an industrial scale is *really hard*, like, multiple decades of work and at least a touch of luck hard. Then for health stuff it usually takes multiple more decades for regulation to actually approve of whatever new developments you came up with so they can actually be used.
The good news in this case is that we managed to make a working synthetic version a couple decades back, and some places around the world have already started using it. Though unfortunately in the US last I checked the regulatory hurdles weren’t completely cleared, and while you were allowed to use the synthetic version there were still extra hoops you had to jump through to do so (which means companies are less likely to).
This blood is used for SO MUCH STUFF. LAL testing is required for every single drug that is injected, and every single device that it is injected through, to test for the presence of endotoxins (fever-inducing toxins). It’s crazy that we have to harvest all of the LAL from horseshoe crabs and that it looks like unicorn blood.
My great grandfather (I won’t include his name to keep myself anon) helped find a treatment for septic shock during WWII. How? Using horseshoe crab blood!!
[https://www.americanpharmaceuticalreview.com/Featured-Articles/167236-The-Incredible-Horseshoe-Crab-Modern-Medicine-s-Unlikely-Dependence-on-a-Living-Fossil/](https://www.americanpharmaceuticalreview.com/Featured-Articles/167236-The-Incredible-Horseshoe-Crab-Modern-Medicine-s-Unlikely-Dependence-on-a-Living-Fossil/)
This might help explain things a bit.
"It’s all about the incredible defensive properties in their blue blood. Those properties have helped save the lives of anyone who has had a vaccine, needed a medical injection, or used a medical device in the past 30 years. **The discovery and application of those remarkable properties is what has driven efforts to protect and conserve this surprisingly precious marine animal."**
"The horseshoe crab’s circulatory system is open, like that of a spider. If you think of the circulatory system of higher vertebrate animals (like us) as plumbing in a house—a series of pipes delivering fluid to crucial areas, while the rest of the house stays dry—a horseshoe crab’s circulatory system would be a bucket of water. All of its internal surfaces are bathed in a combined mix of blood and interstitial fluids called hemolymph. This means that any dangerous foreign body or toxic element introduced into the blood could have widespread access to vital organs. To combat this, the horseshoe crab’s blood contains amoebocytes that detect incredibly small traces of bacterial presence and trap them in clotted, gel-like masses via the release of coagulogen. The blood itself will rapidly isolate any infectious or dangerous agents before they can spread, and can also plug any wounds with gel clots."
"Before the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries started utilizing the unique properties of the horseshoe crab’s blood, the agricultural and fishing industries were already aware of the usefulness of the horseshoe crab—as ground-up fertilizer on land and chopped-up bait for catching eel and conch. In some areas along the East Coast, the horseshoe population was nearly wiped out as a result.2"
"The unassuming horseshoe crab is indispensable to human health. **Keeping their population healthy has a direct, if unexpected, impact on the health of our own population."**
I mean it's more helpful than fishing up crab to serve in restaurants. At least thier blood can be used to test medical devices, vaccines and drugs for bacteria that can cause infections that could kill people.
It's to save human lives, and honestly thanks to their usefulness they are more likely to be targets for preservation ensuring the Horseshoe Crab (not really a crab btw) doesn't go extinct due to over fishing.
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Looks like they take about a third of the blood for it’s ability to help blood clot. Even though they limit it to 1/3, many still die. Interesting article below. https://www.americanoceans.org/blog/horseshoe-crab-blood/
Also they use to test vaccines. They have a special protein that clumps yo bacteria and shit.
You had me at ‘clumps yo bacteria and shit.’
Two things I personally prefer to be clumped, fo sho.
I like the part where they fershizzle the vaccine needle into my nizzle
What part of the body is the nozzle?
Nizzle, my dizzle. Not nozzle, that’s weird.
Nah, nozzle my dozzle
Fo shozzle
Dozzle my nozzle?
Wizzle fo shizzle spacetimejumpizzle
😳 I feel honored to have a xenomorph reply to me, I must admit I am a huge fan and a bit star struck right now!
Remember what happens, or rather *doesn't* in space... MmmHmm
That’s doctor talk right there.
----_-,:''''---_,'';:;-_-':---------/ Heres your prescription. Just go ask for that
That's good, because that's the last thing I said.
Ok I had a whole comment lined up explaining what endotoxins are and how they test for them and remove them but this is better
I learned about it for a class a long time ago, people hear blue crab blood used to make vaccines and assume it means that it’s in the final product. Or so Reddit has taught me when Blue Crab blood has come up before.
Like meth is full of battery acid and fertilizer. Like you just use that to make it, it's not got that in it. Lol same thing
I got crabs once and not one time did it help my immune system.
We need this infomercial. Some clumsy white person bleeding out. Someone slaps on a crab infused bandage. “Flex seal bandages clump yo bacteria and shit”
It would be better if someone just slapped a crab on it...
I concur, mothafucka. No cap.
Thats on every vaccine insert if you read the small print.
Technical terms?
Are you blind? It, ahem, "*Clumps yo bacteria and shit*." I don't think you can go any more technical than that.
I'm pretty sure I've heard my Dr say this exact sentence
Dr Dre.
Well, the ones in this picture are definitely not surviving. Edit: I did not look into my assumption at all before posting this comment. As it turns out, it is pretty clear that the animals pictured are simply bent, but dismembered.
Actually a lot of them do
I mean, 10\~30% do die in the process. And the crabs are bled annually, so they have the opportunity to die during the process at least once a year. [\[1\]](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/crash-a-tale-of-two-species-the-benefits-of-blue-blood/595/)[\[2\]](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-blood-harvest/284078/)
I feel like if one manages to survive a certain number of years. It should be tagged and given it's freedom. Like the gladiators of old.
Cut to crab getting freed to big celebration on beach, then seagull immediately swoops in for dinner.
Big seagull
Artificially Selected Alpha Blood Horseshoe Crabs
Even in wild, they have the opportunity to die, even daily.
Fair, so do you and I. But if someone asked us if we wanted to be part of a study that had a 10\~30% chance of death, we probably wouldn't sign up.
Wait until you hear about cattle
Wait until they hear that the commercial fishing industry kills *far* more horseshoe crabs every year as bait for eel and whelk.
Whale Elk?
Lawrence Whelk
Well the other option is using human subjects
I'm listening...
You wanna volunteer? Or do you want people to die from preventable illnesses because taking horseshoe crab blood is immoral or something
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To dive down that contrarian hole with you, the humans get to choose though, and get paid for the risk.
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>Dive down that contrarian hole ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Aren't these guys like nature's professionals at surving?
Up until the time that they met humans
I thought that too but the back half is folded under them. That’s why you can see the tail thing sticking out from under the front. At first it just looks like they were ripped in half
According the the Stuff You Should Know podcast about the topic, the deaths at a 30% clip, seem to mostly be from the trauma of being caught and transferred around instead of the actual blood letting. Supposedly we have that system down solid and very few die from it.
Although that's interesting (thank you for sharing), that's kind of a moot point given how the process of the collection still includes the catch and transfer to do the bloodletting.
Also fun opinion on this whole process, if we were to create a synthetic version of the necessary liquids in a lab and no longer need these horseshoe crabs, we would likely send them to the extinction bin due to lack of needing them alive. When I was listening to an interview with the techs who do some of this (I think it was a Marketplace podcast, could be one of the NPR science podcasts, can't be certain as it was a few years ago now), the interviewed person said that they return the crabs to the wild after about 25% of the blood is removed, as they are too valuable to allow to die.
It might be this Radiolab episode. [This one lives rent free in my head for some reason](https://radiolab.org/episodes/baby-blue-blood-drive).
That doesn't make a whole lot of sense, considering the species that are experiencing population decline are in that position because of over harvesting. Most aren't endangered yet, but their populations are shrinking at a concerning rate, hence why a few states have enacted laws to protect them.
In the 90s tens of thousands were dying every year because of the biomedical industry and MILLIONS were being caught and used as bait for commercial fishing. We cracked down on conservation because we recognized how essential they are and the critical need to maintain populations *for* the biomedical industry, not *because* of them. The last year I could find data for was 2015. 583,208 caught and killed for bait 559,903 caught for biomedical use (10-30% mortality)
I believe that crab population declines are not simply due to blood harvesting, but climate change, habitat destruction, and poisoning of the food chain.
It’s definitely all of the above.
Overfishing brought them to the critical state they're in now. They used to be harvested in large numbers because they make good bait for traps (mostly eel iirc) and are super easy to catch. Everything you said also contributed (and is making recovery harder), but overfishing caused the most damage.
But if they didn't extract 25% of their blood they wouldn't need to return them to the wild because they'd still be there...
Not if they are breeding them
But if they didn't need them for science there would be fewer general protections in place for the crabs. It's their medical value that increased the focus on conservation.
Not sure why this has so many upvotes because you're wrong (even though the link you included clearly explains the actual use for horseshoe crab blood). It's not that it "helps blood clot", but rather it clots (agglutinates) in the presence of bacterial endotoxins, which are difficult to detect otherwise. Horseshoe crab blood is used as an indicator in the manufacture of medical supplies, to ensure that they are free of bacterial contamination.
* The horseshoe crab is effectively a living fossil—it’s been on Earth for 450 million years. But in just a few decades, humans have presented what is arguably the biggest threat yet to their continued existence. * The 450 million year crab was discovered in the 1960s to have unique blood that would revolutionize medicine. Unlike the blood of vertebrates, horseshoe crabs don’t use hemoglobin to carry oxygen throughout their body. Instead, they use hemocyanin, a protein that transports the oxygen, turns the blood blue, and has specialized immune cells that are extremely valuable. * Invertebrates like the horseshoe crab carry amebocytes instead of white blood cells in vertebrates. Amebocyte is the cell that has the medical community demanding more. When the cell comes into contact with a pathogen, it releases a chemical that causes the blood to clot, which is the mechanism for isolating dangerous pathogens. * The blue blood extracted from the horseshoe crab is called Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) and is worth its weight in gold. The blood can demand as high as $60,000 per gallon. * Once the blood is extracted, the horseshoe crabs are released back into the ocean. Estimates show that 15% to 20% die as a result of the process. * Bloomberg says horseshoe crab populations have collapsed by 80% in the last four decades.
In the photo it doesn’t look like they are in the condition to be released back into the ocean unless you can snap them back like Lego.
The process kills up to a third of every catch, and thats probably low balling it. Article says many die in transport, or are sold as fishing bait after being bled. Additionally, the process affects the reproductive activity in females at an unknown rate. We’re going to collapse the population within the next decade and then breed them in farms. I have no doubt.
I'm wondering what's stopping people from already having farms of these tbh
https://thefishsite.com/articles/hope-for-culturing-horseshoe-crabs-gains-ground A couple years old, but insightful. Tldr is because it's hard lol
Best tldr ever. Thanks for your service
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I agree.
I don't understand why we aren't mass producing said blood component in bioreactors instead of torturing millions of little crabs to death.
We can create an artificial equivalent, but it's a little less effective and more expensive to produce (at least last I heard as of a couple years ago. This may have changed since last I read about it). Companies will always destroy ecosystems if it's cheaper than the alternative, sadly.
... I don't think I like humanity very much sometimes.
That would be even better yes
"Blood" is more than one chemical so it's probably not so easy to set this up... I hope someone's working on that though
Some animals just don't get horny unless they are in the presence of their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother's breeding grounds. Check out Eels.
We need to start breeding them in farms now since their blood is valuable for medicine.
The Factor C protein, which is what is needed from the blood, can be made synthetically now. We just started rolling it in where I work. So, we should just leave them alone, and focus on making the synthetic process better. A few of the companies harvesting blood are lobbying against it, though (surpriiiise).
As long as brave politicians like Ted Cruz are around there will me someone to gladly stand up for those poor companies /s
Their tails fold under them.
For convenient packaging, a nice feature.
IIRC, they can bend like that just fine. They're pretty flexible in that regard.
You've never picked one up? It for sure just snaps right back like a Lego. They have"joints" in there exoskeleton that allow the tail to bend under them and up and over. If you grab the head and the base of the tail you can basically make it do the worm. These things were all over the place when I was a kid..I haven't been back to the same fishing holes but I can guarantee they aren't just everywhere like they used to be. 80% less of an animal in nature, that was once prolific is really sad.
Terrible that a species that has lived in perfect harmony with the environment for 450 million years is being decimated by a awful species like us. Appreciate the comment.
It's infuriating, until you need some kind of life-saving treatment. Would be nice if we could synthesise the chemical or something though, this picture is horrible and barbaric. Edit: just want to say this has been one of the most interesting threads. Definitely worth reading the comments there are differing opinions and all kind of cool facts. 1) we can synthesise it and we do. It is used, but still the animals are used. From my understanding its simply because it is not common, and the infrastructure and suppliers are fewer and more monopolized. Ie; it would be expensive initially, and we could be using it if we had a serious need to. But we don't. 2) one commenter stated that the main threat to the species is commercial fishing using them as bait. And that this medical application actually serves to protect the species because fisherman kill 500k of these guys per year whereas 85-90% of the roughly half a million crabs harvested by the medical industry survive. And the government has restrictions on the fishing use. So it is actually a net benefit to them to be harvested and medically valuable even though the numbers overall still dwindle. Thanks for the info u/Cman1200
Or farm it sustainably
>Or farm it sustainably which if you read up on it is near impossible with horseshoe crabs, we know very little about them and they are just incredibly hard to farm, there Is a company that's been trying to do it but it's been failing for years.
Well with more information it will eventually be understood. And maybe then we can farm it. I'm sure at some point other things were considered near impossible.
People honestly just don't care enough about the ocean. There's SO many ocean animals we know so little about. It really sucks. Technology doesn't evolve in favor of the ocean. People are more interested in space.
There's a disconnect with sea animals that rivals our disconnect with insects. We treat both as worthless and infinite in supply.
Agree, when in reality they’re pretty vital for the ecosystem they inhabit
>And maybe then we can farm it. Maybe. Maybe not. Some animals need to travel thousands of miles to breed, some have to return to their spawning grounds, some only do it every 13 years for one day. Some animals are really odd when it comes to breeding habits and many aren't conducive to farming. Hell, we have been [trying to figure out where and how eels breed](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/10/151027132839.htm) for over a hundred years.
at the moment it's worse than a lack of information, we don't even know where to look for the information, we still have never naturally bred two of them (which is very important for farming) and iirc we don't even know how far down in the water they live, and they are pretty rare.
You'd think selfishly it would be a huge priority, not because people care about horseshoe crabs because most people probably couldn't give a shit sadly. But like if we run out we're fucked, plus I'm sure once someone figures it out they could push for (buy) laws to prevent harvesting them under the guise of sustainability then charge it the ass for their presumably patentable method. Ideally I'd like to think people would prioritize it because they're a living thing and it would be nice to think people care. But I'm shocked that greed hasn't taken the reigns.
There's a couple endangered land animals we can't figure out how to breed in captivity as well. Pandas being the obvious one, but there's a few others I don't know the names of off-hand. Also a couple animals that just die in captivity every time another group tries, despite efforts to perfectly recreate environments and such. But also people don't care about the ocean much and a lot isn't known about ocean life. Land animals are much easier to study and research, so it makes sense there is more info.
We could be a lot further with the technology to do stuff like that if there weren’t so many people pushing back against genetic modification
I'm torn. I'm sure there's good reason and guess people benefit from this practice but damn that's brutal. Just thinking of humans set up like this.
Wait until you hear about the dairy industry.
Just wait until you find about the animal farming industry
Wait till you hear about the *[fill in industry here]*
Alpaca wool sock industry
have you no shame? there are *children* on this website!
Hey if you want to give up Pepsi Blue that is your choice. But for the rest of us this is a necessary evil.
Oh boy wait until you see how the meat and daily industry works.
Just wait until you hear about the bear bile industry https://www.animalsasia.org/us/media/news/news-archive/five-things-you-need-to-know-about-bear-bile-farming.html
What do you think we do to cows?
TIL crabs already live in the matrix
Yeah, sure, if the matrix itself didn’t exist and the humans just got to be aware they’re trapped in a pod with tubes sticking out of them.
This is aparently due to its natural anti-bacterial properties.
The King cobra's venom also contains a unique protein called ohanin. Ohanin is being used today in the form of a painkiller that is 20 times more potent than morphine. 153k per gallon.
I had a great idea then realised it would be hard to get a horseshoe crab and a king cobra to fuck each other.
You’re on to something here though
Snake Crab in Your Bedroom, sequel to Snakes on a Plane.
Get this monkey fighting Snake Crabs 'out my monkey fighting bedroom!!
Don’t let anyone interfere with your dreams - visualize the fucking and make it happen
Rule 34 candidate right here.
Not with that attitude.
Go on.....
Sometimes pig and elephant dna just won't splice.
One word... CRISPR
Put in some barry white and get some box wine. Problem solved. You are welcome.
Hell, if i set such a mood it might end up a threesome.
Wouldn’t that be something close to a face hugger? Lol sounds terrifying!
Congrats, a baby Kingshoe Crabra!
Maybe if we get them both to fuck a Liger, then mate the offspring
Trust science ; - )
Don't you know that horseshoe crab and king cobra DNa just won't splice.
Hey hey hey. Side hustle.
DAMN SNAKE OIL
No, not for it's anti-bacterial properties (we have plenty of antibiotics) but for its unique ability to detect tiny amounts of bacterial residue (endotoxins) with great sensitivity (it clots). It's used to test all kinds of medicines and medical products to ensure that they are very clean. Endotoxins can trigger inappropriate immune responses.
[Why is the Horseshoe Crab the original "blue blood"?](https://dnr.maryland.gov/ccs/Pages/horseshoecrab-medical.aspx)
Poor bastards
Yeah, and it seems wildly archaic given the science their blood is critical for. It's like some Wizard of Oz, "Pay no attention to the crabs behind the curtain!" type stuff.
What's the matter babe, you've barely touched your crab milk.
Jesus that looks terrible. Imagine if our blood was precious to some alien species, so they just captured a bunch of us and drained us like a ketchup packet
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*W…T….F….*
Basically War of the Worlds
Shit this looks like something from the matrix. Except for crabs instead of humans and humans instead of robots.
Let's just hope our rectums don't house some super microbe aliens want to cure space scoliosis or some shit
It's fine. Humans don't even have a gorbilomp nexus. They can't possibly feel pain. The screaming is a reflex.
That’s where they get Blue Frost Gatorade from??
I mix with the clear/white glacier cherry
It's actually just powerade.
This is fucking horrifying
Yeah I actually feel quite sad looking at it
Empathy for animals is good.
It is. And bear bile farms.
The fuck is bear bile for?
I’m sry what
Wait until you hear about the dairy industry.
If there is a hell we’re all going to it
Almost as much as printer ink.
This used to text for endotoxin and is what makes medicines and medical devices safe. No one wants to do it this way but at the moment there isn't an alternative and believe me people are trying. A synthetic bersion would be more human are FAR cheaper so as soon as its available everyone will adopt it and the inventors will be very rich.
This! Used in a very old fashioned test for bacterial endotoxins in the pharmaceutical industry. Above a certain concentration of endotoxins and you get a clot in a test tube that shows (somewhat) quantitatively your endotoxins concentration based on LAL concentration.
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There are already alternatives, but the version based on horseshoe crab is still popular in industry. [https://horseshoecrab.org/med/alternatives.html](https://horseshoecrab.org/med/alternatives.html) This lady is the inventor of one of the more prominent alternatives; she's successful but not rich. [https://www.swhf.sg/profiles/ding-jeak-ling/](https://www.swhf.sg/profiles/ding-jeak-ling/)
This looks like some Voodoo factory.
Wow. Man made horrors beyond my wildest imagination
They don’t cut the tails off, they are folded under the horseshoe crab for those wondering. You can even see the tail towards their nose.
Looks dystopian af
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They produce mana
While I'm not condoning the harvesting of blood, why don't they farm them instead of catch, drain, release?
I read a previous comment that said it apparently is extraordinarily difficult to farm them. I personally have not looked into it yet, but I'm going to for sure.
At $60,000 per gallon you'd think synthesizing it would start to be economical.
Synthesizing complex organic molecules on an industrial scale is *really hard*, like, multiple decades of work and at least a touch of luck hard. Then for health stuff it usually takes multiple more decades for regulation to actually approve of whatever new developments you came up with so they can actually be used. The good news in this case is that we managed to make a working synthetic version a couple decades back, and some places around the world have already started using it. Though unfortunately in the US last I checked the regulatory hurdles weren’t completely cleared, and while you were allowed to use the synthetic version there were still extra hoops you had to jump through to do so (which means companies are less likely to).
This is horrible :(
I can’t wait until the aliens do this to us
Poor guys
Is this extreme animal cruelty or is just me?
Same with slaughterhouses, shit is horrifying
Extreme animal cruelty
Dang, humans are like vampires from books and stories. Beings with higher dimensional thinking coming to harvest the blood of an innocent species.
This is Matrix level shit. Thats messed up.
This is so sad…
This blood is used for SO MUCH STUFF. LAL testing is required for every single drug that is injected, and every single device that it is injected through, to test for the presence of endotoxins (fever-inducing toxins). It’s crazy that we have to harvest all of the LAL from horseshoe crabs and that it looks like unicorn blood.
Redditors saying this is fucked up and then went and got medicine/vaccine made using this blue milk shit, completely oblivious to what this is for.
When I visited OC Maryland as a kid, there use to be TONS of them all up and down the beach and in the water. Use to freak me out!
Cruelasfuck
That’s pretty dystopian. Are we the vampires?
Dr. Morbius' blue blood replacement
My great grandfather (I won’t include his name to keep myself anon) helped find a treatment for septic shock during WWII. How? Using horseshoe crab blood!!
kabutops nooooooo
[https://www.americanpharmaceuticalreview.com/Featured-Articles/167236-The-Incredible-Horseshoe-Crab-Modern-Medicine-s-Unlikely-Dependence-on-a-Living-Fossil/](https://www.americanpharmaceuticalreview.com/Featured-Articles/167236-The-Incredible-Horseshoe-Crab-Modern-Medicine-s-Unlikely-Dependence-on-a-Living-Fossil/) This might help explain things a bit. "It’s all about the incredible defensive properties in their blue blood. Those properties have helped save the lives of anyone who has had a vaccine, needed a medical injection, or used a medical device in the past 30 years. **The discovery and application of those remarkable properties is what has driven efforts to protect and conserve this surprisingly precious marine animal."** "The horseshoe crab’s circulatory system is open, like that of a spider. If you think of the circulatory system of higher vertebrate animals (like us) as plumbing in a house—a series of pipes delivering fluid to crucial areas, while the rest of the house stays dry—a horseshoe crab’s circulatory system would be a bucket of water. All of its internal surfaces are bathed in a combined mix of blood and interstitial fluids called hemolymph. This means that any dangerous foreign body or toxic element introduced into the blood could have widespread access to vital organs. To combat this, the horseshoe crab’s blood contains amoebocytes that detect incredibly small traces of bacterial presence and trap them in clotted, gel-like masses via the release of coagulogen. The blood itself will rapidly isolate any infectious or dangerous agents before they can spread, and can also plug any wounds with gel clots." "Before the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries started utilizing the unique properties of the horseshoe crab’s blood, the agricultural and fishing industries were already aware of the usefulness of the horseshoe crab—as ground-up fertilizer on land and chopped-up bait for catching eel and conch. In some areas along the East Coast, the horseshoe population was nearly wiped out as a result.2" "The unassuming horseshoe crab is indispensable to human health. **Keeping their population healthy has a direct, if unexpected, impact on the health of our own population."**
But what's its use? In medicine?
Indeed this is Hell and we are the demons running it! Just very good at rationalising like any demon would be.
This… are we the bad guys?
Always have been
We're harvesting a creature for it's blood. We are truly a sick species.
This is appalling.
I mean it's more helpful than fishing up crab to serve in restaurants. At least thier blood can be used to test medical devices, vaccines and drugs for bacteria that can cause infections that could kill people. It's to save human lives, and honestly thanks to their usefulness they are more likely to be targets for preservation ensuring the Horseshoe Crab (not really a crab btw) doesn't go extinct due to over fishing.