For those who don’t know, the blue liquid is their blood
Why are they draining it in this way? Poor things.
It’s catch and release so they let them go afterwards where they found them. Horseshoe crab blood is an essential biomedical tool that’s saved countless lives.
What are some example uses for the blood? I’m fascinated.
Thanks for the reply too.
It’s an anticoagulant and can detect the smallest traces of endotoxins in medicine. I’m sure I’m missing some details but there are some great medical journals that detail the process and help explain why it’s $60,000 a gallon.
$15.85 per ml, for a more at scale measurement.
How close is this stuff to HP’s Cyan?
With how much those things cost, I wouldn’t be surprised if some horseshoe crab blood was mixed in to really make the color pop.
I just snorted
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Is this why the royals are rich? Because they have blue blood.
I, uh, I may have an economic recovery proposal.
It is not an anticoagulant, quite the opposite actually. The blood (limulus amoebocyte lysate) will coagulate at the slightest hint of gram-negative bacteria and their endotoxins.
It’s most likely a defense mechanism against bacterial infections.
It’s widely used in medicine to check for bacterial contamination of injectable pharmaceuticals.
Discoveries like this always makes me wonder, who had the idea to try it and why
wait until you hear about protamines and their medical uses
Woah. Are horseshoe crabs like other crustaceans in that they eat pretty much anything including/mostly detritus?
If thats the case, than how would it be beneficial to have blood that coagulates so easily?
Wouldn’t every meal lead to a crab version of a stroke?
Horseshoe crabs are not crusteceans, they are early chelicerates.
They have an open circulatory system, where the blood (heamolymph) freely spills out of the arteries into surrounding tissues, so a small clot probably wouldn’t cause issues. Think of it like a cyst, sometimes if an infection can’t be removed by the immune system, your body will just enclose it in a capsule, so it can’t spread.
They are not crabs nor crustaceans.
Probably so it can detect it as quickly as possible for elimination.
Where can someone find these horseshoe crabs?
And are they able to be bred in captivity?
Pls respond fast, I’m already driving to home depot to buy the largest above ground pool they have.
On horseshoes, sure why not, and buy two
Most aquariums have a horseshoe crab petting exhibit. Hands on.
If you are a fast enough runner i bet you could take a couple
The blood contains a coagulent which clots in the presence of bacterial toxins. It is extracted and used to ensure that medical equipent and stuff such as vaccines are sterile and safe.
The main use is to detect how much endotoxins (proteins that cause our immune system to react) are present in a sample. This is important because we often use bacteria/fungus/yeast to produce medicine and then remove the microorganism from that medicine. This checks for anything left behind in that process, far more sensitive than any other test or machine can do.
If it wasn’t for horseshoe crab blood, creating medicine that is safe for injection would be a lot harder and potentially more dangerous.
Here’s a description of the bleeding process:
https://www.horseshoecrab.org/med/bestpractices.html
It’s specifically non-fatal:
Bleeding horseshoe crabs to death is not an acceptable practice in the U.S.
The volume of blood taken is actually quite small, as most of the material in the collection jars is anticoagulant.
It may look uncomfortable to us humans, but keep in mind that horseshoe crabs are not human. What’s normal for the spider is chaos for the fly. Granted, it would be kinda weird to be hoisted from your home by a giant ape and forced into a blood drive. It’s done as gently as possible though.
Unfortunately the practice often results in death anyway. 30% die in the process.
It also has unforseen consequences in the food chain, so by all means we should look for alternatives.
Thankfully alternatives already exist .
Last I read synthetic LAL was nowhere near scaleable. Bleeding Crabs is very expensive.
By vegan moral logic they shouldn’t be allowed to accept vaccines.
Not taking vaccines is endangering far more people
Hmm. Assuming that the production was actually harmless, what’s the difference between wearing a wool sweater made from excess animal production of wool and using a vaccine made from excess animal blood?
No such thing as “excess blood”, brother. That’s why we generally want it to stay inside of our bodies.
Yes donors voluntarily give up a pint of blood every month, because it replenishes.
Vegans can receive transfusions because I believe it’s down to “consent”. Humans consent to the blood draw. Crabs do not.
So vegans shouldn’t be taking any medicine or vaccines that have had blood crab blood used in their manufacture.
I have discovered the solution to the vegan problem! Tell all vegans about medicine being made using animal blood and they will die out faster than their B12 & iron deficiency does at the moment!
Patent Pending
Still, I was disappointed to find that a large percentage of released crabs die anyway. Can’t find the number, but it’s significant. 1/3rd?
Afair estimates put the portion of dead crabs between 10 and 30%. Some might also be unable to reproduce due to the bleeding.
Sadly a lot of the companies harvesting them will just kill and sell them for bait anyways.
Of those that are released, about a third die. Not to say about the decrease in overall fitness, which can lead to them falling prey more easily.
It’s obviously a traumatic experience for the animal in the best case scenario and that is going to reflect on their ability to survive in the wild.
being bled is not my concept of normal for and species
Oh, I don’t mean the “blood donation” being normal. The person I was responding to asked why they were being drained “this way”. I assumed they were concerned about the folded-over positioning of the crab.
Also, counter argument (in good fun): plenty of animals get their blood drained regularly in nature. Mosquitos, ticks, leaches, and vampire bats are a few examples of things that drain blood from others. Maybe the crabs see us as giant pests?
Defo not the best arrangement for the crabs though. As others pointed out to me, apparently despite the optimistic wording in the link I shared the process is still fatal to some. I’m glad we’re working on alternatives.
Red Cross enters the chat.
Thanks for the link and info.
Not a reply directly to you, but to contrast the dominant view in the thread - what would it matter if even 100% of the crabs died? Sustainability considerations aside - a crab died for my delicious salad, who cares if they die for a life saving vaccine? Who cares if it’s painful and disorienting for the crab, it’s a crab. As humans, why should we prioritize crab life and well-being over our own?
Because we aren’t special and every time we make a stupid decision like that it has disastrous ripple effects.
Ripple effects, sure, I’m with you there, sustainability considerations, which I haven’t seen anyone mentioning ITT.
I completely disagree with you about the status of humanity. Is it really your view that the well-being of a crab has equivalent moral status to your own well-being?
If the crabs die out we lose the blood, from both sides its better to be as sustainable as possible.
I don’t like hurting animals. If one believes we really are a special species because of things like our innate curiosity, I think you’ll understand the interesting quest to try to eat without hurting anyone/thing.
Why? Better, why not?
- Consider how difficult “getting off this rock” is with live food onboard. Plants can directly feed humans with limited processing. With some processing, you can make tasty high protein burgers that taste a lot like beef. Admittedly, still not nutritionally the same as beef, but compensable in other ways.
- We’re a concious species (mostly), why not try to avoid hurting our fellow companions in this barren wasteland called space? Who else do we have in the known universe?
I still eat eggs & cheese. Perhaps a day will come where I don’t need those either. I hope you’ll be curious enough to try some alternatives too.
I’ve read good moral arguments for a veganism. I think it’s the right thing to do when it comes to diet. For what it’s worth, this isn’t really a discussion about diet.
It isn’t a decision between a lentil burger and a beef burger, this is an animal resource that can assist in saving human lives. There are other clotting factors used in medicine, and that’s great, let’s use and develop those. But suppose something more lethal and dangerous than COVID comes along, and vaccines need to be produced quickly and globally. I think it would be foolish to wince if we needed to take crab blood to roll out a program that would save human lives.
I completely disagree with you about the status of humanity.
Why because we happened to evolve to think? Given enough time something else would of if not us. Given we may end up causing our species to go extinct due to careless disregard for our environment and even human life in general. We really are not that special and it would serve us to treat the ecosystems, which enable life on this planet to thrive and evolve, with respect if we want to live long enough too see other stars or at least leave the planet in a decent state for the next species if we all die from pointless wars like humanity seems to love doing regardless of if we treat our environment better.
I don’t know about spacecowboy, but I do. I still eat crabs, but I don’t think I’m superior to them morally just because I’m more intelligent or something. We’re just animals eating each other.
What I mean when I say moral is, I don’t see why it’s wrong if a bunch of invertebrates are subjugated, in pain, or die in order to provide something that improves the lives of humans. It’s not sad, it’s a good thing. “Oh but the crabs get stressed out, and 30% might die”, yeah, who cares, they’re crabs.
Sure, I’m a human, and I have a particular perspective on these things. But, we are special. Anyone who considers a trolley problem with a crab on one track, and a human on the other and honestly says, “hey it doesn’t matter humans aren’t special”, that’s, unappealing. In a purely academic, cosmic, arrangement of particles sense, OK, nothing is special. But in that condition, the suffering of animals isn’t even a question worth considering.
The fact that so many accounts in this thread are going out of their way to give weight to the well-being of invertebrates, in a conversation about human well-being, is baffling.
Should we be using existing clotting factors in medical settings that don’t rely on the blood of an endangered species that lives in an incredibly volatile habitat? Probably, but crab discomfort is at the very bottom of the list of reasons why.
I’d rather see a dead human than a dead non-human, to be honest… (with the exception of insects, those buggers freak me out).
Would you tell that to your spouse when the dead human was your kid?
Highest chance of survival/low stress
Edit: many do die still. I don’t want to say it’s safe, just safer
That’s how blueberry is made Freeze some of this add some structure, let it set, then put it on trees
Because we as a species have decided its okay to torture others for personal gain
This is a necessary evil to save many many human lives. Alternatives are being worked on, but this isn’t just for money or food, it’s for lifesaving medicine.
At the expense of others, also we have synthetic versions of this now.
Obviously didn’t read the meme. It’s a blueberry milkshake. Everyone knows blood isn’t that color.
Which proves they’re all royalty.
King Crab 🦀
So this is basically like a blood farm from vampires? Shit, still surprises me what an evil species we really are.
I kinda agree with you but when you think about it it’s not that bad. They are released afterwards and we can use that blood to save countless people, like you and me.
Dp you enjoy the widespread availability of injectable medicine? The blood is used to detect impurities in injectable medicine.
A pint? That’s nearly an arm-full!
People who know know that the crabs survive and are released back into the wild after their “donation”
Noble sacrifices for the glory of mankind.
Most of them, yes.
So we only catch them, torture them as much as we want and then act like we do good because at some point we “release” them to torture them again in the future.
Do you consider giving blood to be torture?
Is the Red Cross a torture organization?
And don’t bring up “consent”. Horseshoe Crabs are incapable of consenting or not-consenting to anything because they don’t have an advanced enough brain.
they don’t have an advanced enough brain
So that makes it okay to torture them.
Is the Red Cross a torture organization? Torture might not mean what you think it means.
But this is only about the life and death of patients. Nothing important or anything.
And they literally and actually save hundreds of thousands of human AND animal lives by giving blood, which If you’ve never done it (Why Not?) Does not hurt a bit.
Real talk I’m fine with hurting crabs for our own means. Straight up.
Whoa! That’s some Human Supremacist talk there.
Hell yeah. Whole point is to get the species off the rock, then out of the meat suit
Not necessarily in that order
Pretty sure I played a horror game with that concept once… SOMA?
I personally would like to become a conscious cloud of gas.
Or mammal supremacist. Or vertebrate supremacist. There are options
On god, no cap frfr str8 bussin.
Real talk I’m fine with hurting other living beings that aren’t me for my own means. Straight up.
That’s literally life. Unless you’re a plant, you’re killing things to eat.
And if you’re a plant, either you’re eating things that were already killed and/or outright killing other plants for their blood or to take their sunlight. And that’s if you don’t mention carnivorous plants which, ik eat animals
Kinda? I think it’s more accurate to say that the nutrients they need from the soil are from decomposed dead things. Competition for sunlight is a real thing, but I’m not sure if that counts. I suppose it does, since it’s all about survival. Same would go for species that have fights with themselves.
I am.
I know it sucks, but they play an invaluable role in modern medicine, I hope that we can find an alternative to using them, but AFAIK there is nothing that works in the same manner yet.
They may have a substitute in the pipeline
Oh that is excellent news! I was unaware!
discovered that a molecule in LAL called factor C was responsible for its clotting action. Researchers genetically modified the guts of insects—who belong to the same phylum as horseshoe
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apparently everything evolves into crabs anyway
And for those who can’t be arsed reading. Here’s a great video Crabs
*CRAB PEOPLE. CRAB PEOPLE. *
everything evolves into crabs anyway
Does that mean I can become a crab too?
Get to walking sideways and eating mud, friend!
They all serve a purpose in their own way, this one specifically does a great job!
Same here
I’m fine with hurting all wildlife.
Edit: if you realized this was satire, then congrats! If you didn’t, then congrats!
I’m fine with hurting all life.
I am.
Missed an opportunity for “I’m hurting all life.”
I’m fine with missing all opportunities
If horseshoe crabs were to become less economically important, is that a good thing for horseshoe crabs? They ain’t exactly Pandas, so will little Sally and Bobby care if horseshoe crabs become endangered? They’re already in a precarious situation…
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Climate Change is warming the waters they spawn their eggs in. They’re becoming endangered from that. Not because of a few we harvest blood from.
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That’s the topic of this thread and even if you didn’t say blood harvesting was endangering them, most people are already going to be thinking that’s what you’re implying.
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But the blood harvesting helps. Huh. Never thought I’d use the word “blood harvest” today, or ever really.
I think living to have your fluids harvested in factory farms is a worse outcome than going extinct.
Personally speaking, the fluid in question and method of harvest would determine how much I’d rather be dead.
if things got to brain in a jar levels and I am complacently accepting of the fake reality, then I might just live a long life
You can not prove your brain isn’t already in a jar being fed signals to simulate reality.
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Capitalism isn’t a system of morality. Or at least it isn’t supposed to be.
The fact that people think more money = moral is one of the largest problems in the world right now.
I’m pretty sure it was sarcastic.
all hail the paper which ruins literally every single fucking thing. the paper has spoken.
I chose to express it like that by design. My contention is that capitalism is, in fact, or at the very least de facto, a system of morality. It promotes wealth as an indicator of higher moral stature. It has superseded rule of democracy, as wealth has been assigned itself as a metric by which the efficacy of individual civil participation is measured and the path of society determined.
In other words, money equals power, and possessing money/power is indicative of a higher moral. Echoes of medieval times…
Cows and chickens are doing pretty well in terms of raw numbers.
Trivia of the day, horseshoe crab blood is blue because it is copper based instead of iron based like our blood
They’re actually being fed the blue milk from Star Wars 8
That was green milk. Blue milk is from Episode IV.
ah yes, The Final Generation
It’s a simple, nearly instantaneous test that goes by the name of the LAL, or Limulus amebocyte lysate, test (after the species name of the crab, Limulus polyphemus). The LAL test replaced the rather horrifying prospect of possibly contaminated substances being tested on “large colonies of rabbits.” Pharma companies didn’t like the rabbit process, either, because it was slow and expensive.
From https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-blood-harvest/284078/ (emphasis mine).
Once it is fast and cheap, expect to see these alien fluid harvesting plants everywhere.
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Or in China on a Wednesday.
(I am being a little sarcastic, but traditional Chinese medicine can have some really shitty practices.)
They have copper blood… Where is this… Asking for a friend
Just like tmnt
The crabs are released afterwards, it doesn’t kill them. Not saying it’s a perfectly ethical situation, but at least it’s not kill em en masse.
Stop all animal testing and torture
This isn’t specifically animal testing, rather it is a process to get life saving medicine. They are working hard to synthesize it luckily. This has been the subject of a few major podcasts but I can’t remember which ones.
Radiolab has an awesome episode https://radiolab.org/podcast/baby-blue-blood-drive
First off, this isn’t testing. We know exactly what we need Horseshoe Crab blood for, and it’s incredibly important.
Second, it’s probably not torture. The worst-case-scenario level of discomfort from bleeding them is fairly low, like a human giving blood. And that (incorrectly) presupposes them having as advanced pain-sensing as humans. The actual death rate is the bigger issue, but we are talking about saving lives and the medical community is trying really hard to change the status quo on this. Covered below.
Third, what you’re seeing in that picture saves thousands of lives per year. How much human suffering, how many human deaths, are you willing to accept to achieve those goals? What if one of those humans that has to suffer or die was your kid? There’s no plant-based alternative to this process at this time.
Let me clarify this. Using horseshoe crabs for this purpose is VERY EXPENSIVE. It’s only done because we don’t have an alternative yet, and the process is necessary for modern medicine. There is plenty of research going into either making this process less expensive (which probably involves a lower death rate for crabs) or finding an entirely different process to achieve the same goals. But none has been found (well, except that they used to use rabbits for this. I don’t know the details)
I can understand the desire to spare… um…shellfish some…uh… pain I guess. But NOT at the expense of human life and suffering. That’s just silly.
they don’t die tho
Just tortured their entire lives
Wondering when the land people will come to suck their blood again
It’s catch and release, not life long milking. Granted, the survival rate isn’t as high as I’d like (70-90% apparently), but I do also appreciate having safe injectable medicines. All things considered, with a species bias, I’d prefer dozens of humans live at the expense of a… Not crab. Unfortunate though it may be. I can’t also help but notice you’ve anthropomorphised them a bit. I’m certain these creatures respond to negative stimulus, but attributing fear and life long trauma seems to be giving their intelligence a bit of an unfounded boost.
🤓
Honestly, of all the messed up shit we do with animals draining blood from a bunch of crabs for medical purposes seems like one of the less egregious ones.
they catch, “milk” and release them, most of them recover from it. (weaker ones tend to die tho, with survival rate of around 80%)
A lot of them do end up dying from this, yes.
around 20% which is acceptable… i think?
