The Horseshoe Crab: Same as It Ever Was?(daily.jstor.org)
daily.jstor.org
The Horseshoe Crab: Same as It Ever Was?
https://daily.jstor.org/the-horseshoe-crab-same-as-it-ever-was/
7 comments
Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down
There have been a lot of stories lately about how responsible the biotech companies that use horseshoe crab blood are supposed to be, taking some blood and returning them to the sea.
Apparently that is PR fluff, and they mostly chop them up and sell them for bait.
Apparently that is PR fluff, and they mostly chop them up and sell them for bait.
This simply isnt true.
Biomedical companies are required by law to return the horseshoe crab to the ocean.
There is also a commercial fishery which catches the crabs to chop them up as bait without extracting blood. The commercial fishery is larger than the biomedical fishery.
http://www.asmfc.org/species/horseshoe-crab
Biomedical companies are required by law to return the horseshoe crab to the ocean.
There is also a commercial fishery which catches the crabs to chop them up as bait without extracting blood. The commercial fishery is larger than the biomedical fishery.
http://www.asmfc.org/species/horseshoe-crab
Quoting from the article: "however, a portion of these crabs die from the procedure. Crabs harvested for bait are sometimes bled prior to being processed and sold by the bait industry; these crabs are counted against the bait quota".
Loopholes big enough to drive a supertanker through. The biomedical people get what they want. The bait people get what they want. The PR people get what they want. Only the horseshoe crabs have anything to complain about, but they can't talk.
Loopholes big enough to drive a supertanker through. The biomedical people get what they want. The bait people get what they want. The PR people get what they want. Only the horseshoe crabs have anything to complain about, but they can't talk.
They are a fascinating species. Having faced and survived numerous extinction events, they are now under severe pressure from multiple threats.
They are bled (harvested) not once, but twice for their blood, which holds their immuno-active ingredient. That and the pre-bleeding cleaning process severely weakens the specimens. Preferably the females are bled, since they are larger in body (and thus blood mass). Farming and pollution are two more threat vectors.
Then conservation agencies are often in line / sponsored by the CROs are interested in their harvest.
Disclaimer: Had a startup based on Horseshoe Crab sourced LAL. We had quite a bunch of them in our biotech startup lab.
They are bled (harvested) not once, but twice for their blood, which holds their immuno-active ingredient. That and the pre-bleeding cleaning process severely weakens the specimens. Preferably the females are bled, since they are larger in body (and thus blood mass). Farming and pollution are two more threat vectors.
Then conservation agencies are often in line / sponsored by the CROs are interested in their harvest.
Disclaimer: Had a startup based on Horseshoe Crab sourced LAL. We had quite a bunch of them in our biotech startup lab.
[1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43707865
[2]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2410522
Separately, the article reminds me of another fascinating evolutionary tale from phylum Arthropoda. [3]
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation