Blood Harvesting: Horseshoe Crab Risk Extinction As Multi-million Dollar Industry Thrives – Feature

Five companies along the East Coast — with operations in South Carolina, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Virginia and Maryland — drained over 700,000 crabs in 2021. That’s more than any other year since officials started keeping track in 2004.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that more than 30 percent of ocean fish stocks are being overfished and that many of the world’s fish stocks are at risk of being depleted.

The WTO agreement on fisheries subsidies, adopted at the 12th ministerial conference on June 17, 2022,was touted to be a major step forward for ocean sustainability by prohibiting harmful fisheries subsidies, a key factor in the widespread depletion of the world’s fish stocks.

India and other countries had raised concerns during the negotiations that the proposed deal would harm small-scale fishers.

An estimated 50,000 horseshoe crabs in the United States die every year as a result of being captured and bled to serve the pharmaceutical companies. Their populations along the Atlantic coast cascading negative effects throughout the ecosystem.

Horseshoe crab blood is an essential element in testing the safety of new drugs and vaccines.

The conflict now is…horseshoe crab blood has helped humans fight disease since the 1970s, but if over-harvesting continues, there may be none of these crabs left. The contention will be what becomes of this multi-million-dollar industry?

The pharmaceutical companies are raking millions of dollars from this sea creature.

The price of horseshoe crab blood is also unbelievably high, at $15,000 per quart, making it an expensive resource.

But the over-harvesting of horseshoe crabs has made the species increasingly vulnerable to extinction; as Conservationists Lament.

The extraordinary benefits of horseshoe crab blood

Frederik bang, a pathologist who was keen to understand how the ancient sea animal’s immune system worked, did a series of experiments to test horseshoe crab blood and its properties.

He injected bacteria from seawater directly into a horseshoe crab to see how its blood would react to the infected injection. What bang found would ultimately become one of the most important elements of modern medicine safety testing.

Bang suspected that this blood clotting was a natural defense mechanism to protect the rest of the horseshoe crab’s body from an invading pathogen. He published a study in a 1956 paper titled “a bacterial disease of limulus Polyphemus.” he ultimately identified the molecule responsible for this highly-effective immune system as Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL).

Before LAL was identified in horseshoe crab blood, the only way to test the toxicity of new vaccines was to inject lab rabbits and monitor their symptoms. With the discovery of LAL, however, medical scientists were able to simply put a drop of it into an experimental drug and immediately know whether it would be toxic to humans.

By the late 1970s, the U.S food and drug administration began allowing pharmaceutical companies to replace their testing rabbits with LAL kits. The LAL quickly gained popularity as the go-to method for testing toxins in new medicine. Soon, harvesting this blood became a major part of the pharmaceutical industry.

Every year, fishermen catch hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs to ship to their clients like Switzerland-based chemicals company Lonza, which sells LAL.

Horseshoe crab blood is now a sought-after commodity among medical scientists and drug companies. According to a report by the Atlantic, the price of horseshoe crab blood is as much as $15,000 per quart, while LAL kits can cost up to $1,000 per package.

However, the use of horseshoe crab blood in the pharmaceutical industry has also played a role in the decline. During blood harvesting, 30 percent of the crab’s blood is drawn. Although the animals are released back into the wild afterward, up to 30 percent of them don’t even make it through the blood-draining. a research study found that this was because the bleeding process made the animals more vulnerable.

So, even if bleeding a female horseshoe crab didn’t kill it, it may make them less likely to mate, which ultimately leads to dwindling population numbers.