For those who don’t know, the blue liquid is their blood
It’s catch and release so they let them go afterwards where they found them. Horseshoe crab blood is an essential biomedical tool that’s saved countless lives.
What are some example uses for the blood? I’m fascinated.
Thanks for the reply too.
Here’s a description of the bleeding process:
https://www.horseshoecrab.org/med/bestpractices.html
It’s specifically non-fatal:
Bleeding horseshoe crabs to death is not an acceptable practice in the U.S.
The volume of blood taken is actually quite small, as most of the material in the collection jars is anticoagulant.
It may look uncomfortable to us humans, but keep in mind that horseshoe crabs are not human. What’s normal for the spider is chaos for the fly. Granted, it would be kinda weird to be hoisted from your home by a giant ape and forced into a blood drive. It’s done as gently as possible though.
Unfortunately the practice often results in death anyway. 30% die in the process.
It also has unforseen consequences in the food chain, so by all means we should look for alternatives.
Thankfully alternatives already exist .
Still, I was disappointed to find that a large percentage of released crabs die anyway. Can’t find the number, but it’s significant. 1/3rd?
Thanks for the link and info.
Not a reply directly to you, but to contrast the dominant view in the thread - what would it matter if even 100% of the crabs died? Sustainability considerations aside - a crab died for my delicious salad, who cares if they die for a life saving vaccine? Who cares if it’s painful and disorienting for the crab, it’s a crab. As humans, why should we prioritize crab life and well-being over our own?
Because we as a species have decided its okay to torture others for personal gain
This is a necessary evil to save many many human lives. Alternatives are being worked on, but this isn’t just for money or food, it’s for lifesaving medicine.
So this is basically like a blood farm from vampires? Shit, still surprises me what an evil species we really are.
People who know know that the crabs survive and are released back into the wild after their “donation”
So we only catch them, torture them as much as we want and then act like we do good because at some point we “release” them to torture them again in the future.
Do you consider giving blood to be torture?
Is the Red Cross a torture organization?
And don’t bring up “consent”. Horseshoe Crabs are incapable of consenting or not-consenting to anything because they don’t have an advanced enough brain.
they don’t have an advanced enough brain
So that makes it okay to torture them.
Real talk I’m fine with hurting crabs for our own means. Straight up.
Hell yeah. Whole point is to get the species off the rock, then out of the meat suit
Real talk I’m fine with hurting other living beings that aren’t me for my own means. Straight up.
That’s literally life. Unless you’re a plant, you’re killing things to eat.
And if you’re a plant, either you’re eating things that were already killed and/or outright killing other plants for their blood or to take their sunlight. And that’s if you don’t mention carnivorous plants which, ik eat animals
I know it sucks, but they play an invaluable role in modern medicine, I hope that we can find an alternative to using them, but AFAIK there is nothing that works in the same manner yet.
They may have a substitute in the pipeline
They’re chelicerates though, not crustaceans. But then again, apparently everything evolves into crabs anyway
apparently everything evolves into crabs anyway
everything evolves into crabs anyway
Does that mean I can become a crab too?
I’m fine with hurting all wildlife.
Edit: if you realized this was satire, then congrats! If you didn’t, then congrats!
If horseshoe crabs were to become less economically important, is that a good thing for horseshoe crabs? They ain’t exactly Pandas, so will little Sally and Bobby care if horseshoe crabs become endangered? They’re already in a precarious situation…
Horseshoe crabs have been existing for almost half a billion years, I would genuinely be sad if we endanger them to critical levels
Climate Change is warming the waters they spawn their eggs in. They’re becoming endangered from that. Not because of a few we harvest blood from.
I didn’t say that harvesting blood is the one thing endangering them, did I. Just that it would be a shame to see them go
I think living to have your fluids harvested in factory farms is a worse outcome than going extinct.
Personally speaking, the fluid in question and method of harvest would determine how much I’d rather be dead.
if things got to brain in a jar levels and I am complacently accepting of the fake reality, then I might just live a long life
If you are any part of nature and also economically important, you get barbarically exploited until you go extinct. If you are not, you will be bulldozed to make room for the former. Capitalism is the best system of morality humans have ever, and will ever, come up with, and I truly cherish the utopia it has brought upon civilization.
Capitalism isn’t a system of morality. Or at least it isn’t supposed to be.
The fact that people think more money = moral is one of the largest problems in the world right now.
I chose to express it like that by design. My contention is that capitalism is, in fact, or at the very least de facto, a system of morality. It promotes wealth as an indicator of higher moral stature. It has superseded rule of democracy, as wealth has been assigned itself as a metric by which the efficacy of individual civil participation is measured and the path of society determined.
In other words, money equals power, and possessing money/power is indicative of a higher moral. Echoes of medieval times…
Trivia of the day, horseshoe crab blood is blue because it is copper based instead of iron based like our blood
