Horseshoe crab blood is harvested for biomedical use worldwide, but the full repercussions of the industry are still not understood
, exacerbated by booming demand in the Asia-Pacific biomedical market, threaten to shift the industry even more to the Atlantic horseshoe crab, according to conservation groups and biomedical companies.
that increased need for horseshoe crab blood, driven partly by the emergence of personalized medicine such as cell and gene therapies, may place “too great a burden” on the Atlantic species. The climbing toll from the crab-bleeding industry raises questions about our obligations to the animals that supply life-saving materials for human benefit, especially when there’s a synthetic alternative to amebocyte lysate, called recombinant factor C , available, says Christian Hunt, who leads horseshoe crab policy atWithout better oversight of horseshoe crab bleedings and outcomes, he says, “It’s the Wild West for the biomedical industry.”In recent years, a few U.S.
. Workers truck their live catch to the company’s labs. Each lab’s protocols vary, but generally the animals are cleaned, the barnacles and sea detritus pried from their shells, and a large needle is inserted into their bodies. Their extracted blue blood then drips out into bottles placed directly below the animal. Workers outfitted in lab coats, hair nets, and masks oversee the procedure—extracting roughly a third of each animal’s blood. Then the crabs are returned to the wild.
“We know what the [harvest and mortality] numbers are—it’s not a secret,” says Kristen Anstead, a stock assessment scientist at the ASMFC.
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