Horseshoe crabs’ contribution to modern medicine comes at a cost
Thursday, June 19, 2014  Horseshoe crab - unh research   Spring
is also the season of the horseshoe crab harvest, when fishermen
working for biomedical companies pluck them from beaches and
take them to labs to extract their precious blue blood. It's the
only known source of a clotting agent--Limulus amoebocyte
lysate—that's used to test vaccines and medical devices for
bacterial contamination. After removing 30 to 40 percent of each
animal's blood, the labs put the crabs back in the water or sell
them as bait.  New research from UNH and Plymouth State suggests
that biomedical bleeding of horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus)
might be playing a larger role in their decline than previously
thought. The primitive, odd-looking horseshoes play a vital role
in coastal ecosystems from the Gulf of Mexico to the North
Atlantic, plowing the muck in bays and estuaries to bring up
buried nutrients that feed countless other creatures. Their eggs
are also a m