Posted on 10/24/2018 1:53:58 AM PDT by piasa
New research from Plymouth State University and the University of New Hampshire indicates that collecting and bleeding horseshoe crabs for biomedical purposes causes short-term changes in their behavior and physiology that could exacerbate the crabs' population decline in parts of the east coast.
Each year, the U.S. biomedical industry harvests the blue blood from almost half a million living horseshoe crabs for use in pharmaceuticals—most notably, a product called Limulus amebocyte lysate (LAL), used to ensure vaccines and medical equipment are free of bacterial contamination. This lifesaving product can only be made from horseshoe crab blood, says researcher Win Watson, UNH professor of zoology. "The crabs are very heavily bled—about 30 percent or more of their blood is taken, and that's a fair amount," says Chris Chabot, professor of neurobiology at PSU and a co-author on the study. "Approximately 20 to 30 percent of those crabs do not survive, so we were curious if any of the surviving crabs experienced nearly lethal effects from the bleeding," he said. The study, "Sublethal Behavioral and Physiological Effects of the Biomedical Bleeding Process on the American Horseshoe Crab," was published recently in the journal The Biological Bulletin....
The researchers found that for approximately two weeks after the bleeding procedure, the crabs' behavior differed from their behavior prior to the bleeding—they moved less frequently and with different patterns and rhythms, indicating they may have been disoriented. The researchers hope to track the movements of bled horseshoe crabs in their native environments to verify that their lab findings apply to real life behavioral changes. One of the concerns, Anderson explains, is that the crabs are collected for bleeding during their breeding cycle when it's easiest to capture them on beaches. If the crabs are bled and then returned to the beach in a disoriented condition, they might be less likely to breed. This has the potential to exacerbate the population declines that are already occurring in parts of the east coast, including Delaware and Cape Cod. The populations in N.H. seem to be holding steady at the moment.
"If the biomedical industry could delay the blood harvest, it would probably help these animals," Chabot says. "For example, if they are bled after the breeding season, then they could recover in the subsequent months, fatten up and survive the winter without any problems to be able to breed again the following year," he said. Watson suggests that the conditions under which they are transported could be improved as well. Fishermen capture the horseshoe crabs and often place them on a hot boat deck until they are transported by truck to the biomedical facility, all the while out of water and unable to breathe. If instead they were kept in cold, well-aerated water and perhaps fed, their stress levels might decrease and thus improve their chances of survival and ability to breed upon return to their native habitat. Watson also notes that it is unclear which part of the process is the most detrimental—the bleeding, the transporting, or simply keeping the crabs in the lab and out of their natural environment. Their research also revealed that the crabs' levels of hemocyanin, a protein in their system that helps transport oxygen in their blood, decreased...
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2014-02-biomedical-affects-horseshoe-crab-behavior.html#jCp
The Last Days of the Blue-Blood Harvest
Every year, more than 400,000 crabs are bled for the miraculous medical substance that flows through their bodies—now pharmaceutical companies are finally committing to an alternative that doesn’t harm animals.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/blood-in-the-water/559229/
Thanks for the link.
Always thought horseshoe crabs were cool.
There’s a synthetic alternative.
I know- in just 4 yrs, capitalism to the rescue.
Wouldn’t folks in new Hampshire be able to find blue blood elsewhere?
More “lab experiment” irreproducible junk science from the useless academes.
Time to defund these professional leeches masked as “researchers”.
If someone grabbed me out of my home and stole 30% of my blood I’d probably change my behavior too.
You’d think 30% would have seemed extreme to anyone... but there was the old problem of tragedy of the commons...when resource is owned in common, there’s a natural tendency to overuse it rather than underuse it.
Cooler heads though, once the industry became very profitable, didn’t push it too far because it just doesn’t pay to kill off what you depend on if you want to stay in business for years to come. So there was an incentive to continually try to improve methods for the sake of keeping the resource abundant.
Meanwhile, the profitable use of the crabs in a way that didn’t kill them but milked them meant a lot of research was done on these animals that otherwise would never have been carried out, and largely without the interference of environmental groups that oppose all use of animals. The unhindered research ultimately lead to alternatives and knowledge derived from it will now continue to benefit the species and all the species like Red knots that depend on it.
On the contrary, I think this research is valuable- far too little is known about sea creatures.
Not just 30% of your blood but some ding-a-ling takes it right at a time your species needs to copulate... then tosses you back out where your predators still have 100% of their blood and all their faculties.
Yeah, that would have an impact.
Glad there’s now an alternative.
Can these animals not be grown commercially?
I ask because of the experience in this area with the coconut crab. They are often endangered because the locals eat them and they are easy to catch. There are now crab ranches on Saipan where people grow the things. It turns out it was rather easy to do.
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