[cdestroyer]

https://apnews.com/article/horseshoe-crab-decline-blood-harvest-birds-321477016cbf9809989cb9b0a77f560e

[Cyclopath]

The Atlantic had a fantastic article on this a few years ago, amazingly well written. 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. Horseshoe crabs are sometimes called “living fossils” because they have been around in some form for more than 450 million years. In this time, Earth has gone through multiple major ice ages, a Great Dying, the formation and subsequent breaking up of Pangaea, and an asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and most of life on Earth yet again. In other words, horseshoe crabs have truly seen some sh##. Yet, I would conjecture, some of their strangest experiences must have come in just the past few decades, as one of the soft-bodied mammals that came after dinosaurs began using their hands to scoop horseshoe crabs out of the ocean en masse. Contemporary humans do not deliberately kill the horseshoe crabs—as did previous centuries of farmers catching them for fertilizer or fishermen using them as bait. Instead, they scrub the crabs clean of barnacles, fold their hinged carapaces, and stick stainless steel needles into a soft, weak spot in order to draw blood. Horseshoe-crab blood runs blue and opaque, like antifreeze mixed with milk. And for what exactly do humans need the blood of a living fossil? A sort of witchcraft, you might say, for it literally keeps people alive. Horseshoe-crab blood is exquisitely sensitive to toxins from bacteria. It is used to test for contamination during the manufacture of anything that might go inside the human body: every shot, every IV drip, and every implanted medical device. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/blood-in-the-water/559229/