Slashdot Mirror
Horseshoe Crabs Are Bled Alive To Create an Unparalleled Biomedical Technology
Lasrick writes "Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic: 'The marvelous thing about horseshoe crab blood, though, isn't the color. It's a chemical found only in the amoebocytes of its blood cells that can detect mere traces of bacterial presence and trap them in inescapable clots.' Madrigal continues, 'To take advantage of this biological idiosyncrasy, pharmaceutical companies burst the cells that contain the chemical, called coagulogen. Then, they can use the coagulogen to detect contamination in any solution that might come into contact with blood. If there are dangerous bacterial endotoxins in the liquid—even at a concentration of one part per trillion—the horseshoe crab blood extract will go to work, turning the solution into what scientist Fred Bang, who co-discovered the substance, called a "gel." ... I don't know about you, but the idea that every single person in America who has ever had an injection has been protected because we harvest the blood of a forgettable sea creature with a hidden chemical superpower makes me feel a little bit crazy. This scenario is not even sci-fi, it's postmodern technology.'"
Does PITA know about this? /ducks and covers
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
At least it's a crappy Atlantic columnist making this horrific observation instead of the scientist who discovered this.
There are many people who say that we should let endangered species die out because they are unfit in the current environment and it is just natural for them to die off.
This proves that some species could hold an amazing adaptation that could completely change how we live.
And this is not TIL on reddit.
The technique has been used for years.
Why is it postmodern technology? Because it deconstructs the cells? ;-)
Ezekiel 23:20
I mean, really: wtf ??
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Before this discovery, they used to inject rabbits with the substance being tested, and measured if the rabbits got a fever. It was obviously not a great way to do things. Wasn't very quantifiable or sensitive. Source.
Another bit of trivia: one of the other major commercial uses of horseshoe crabs is cutting them up for bait. Works well for that, but you obviously use up the crabs quickly. So we can inconvenience them for a life-saving medical wonder, or we can kill them for a few pounds of fish to eat. Naturally, using them as bait has not been outlawed.
One last bit of trivia: this isn't really news. I mean, I obviously find it cool, but seriously, 1960 was the discovery. Beta isn't bad enough, now they're altering the content too?
It's one of the big arguments for environmentalism and bio diversity. When push comes to shove you sometimes hear "so what if a few species go extinct? They weren't doing all that well before $BUSINESSACTIVITY, why should we try saving them? Why do I care about this species?". And the answer is that the creature represents a massive chain of thousands to millions of generations of genetic experimentation in real-world real-time environments. We're just starting to open Pandora's box of genetics and culling the biodiversity of the planet could be throwing away truly helpful and useful tools we could use in the future.
Plus genocide is just sort of a dick move.
Horseshoe crabs are hardly a forgotten species when they breed on beaches outside your back door...
Maybe this guy also forgot about the baby fur seals until somebody showed him a picture.
We should probably figure out how to breed them in captivity before we go slitting a million throats every 2 years...
" I don't know about you, but the idea that every single person in America who has ever had an injection has been protected because we harvest the blood of a forgettable sea creature with a hidden chemical superpower makes me feel a little bit crazy. This scenario is not even sci-fi, it's postmodern technology.'"
What? I think you are assuming that we share you beliefs that this is somehow wrong or soemthing? Or are you just marvelled at scietific acomplishments? Or are you the guy with the beret from xkcd, who gets awestruck with danishes?
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
The properties of horseshoe crap blood have been known and used for a long, long time. This seems like it is just some sort of press release.
They have blue blood instead of red blood because they use copper, instead of iron, to move oxygen around their body.
Horse Shoe crabs area already a depleted resource as they have been used as cheap bait for fishermen for years. The impact being subsequent affects to migratory birds who feast on there eggs. I don't think the pharmacological community have a choice but to treat these crustaceans with the respect due
http://www.endangeredspeciesin...
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature...
Boy, am I glad there are no beings above us on the proverbial food chain to imprison us and literally bleed us alive for their medicine, slaughter us in cruel and unruly fashion to feed on, and generally treat us like we're "things" and not living creatures.
Quoting the article: "Each year, half a million horseshoe crabs are captured and bled alive" I think this makes them far from endangered although that is quite a lot of crabs to be caught by one company. Good riddance I say! Who wants a giant shelled scorpion spider crawling in our shallow waters anyway?
I don't think very many people eat them (not much meat on em) and as far as intelligence goes, maybe as about as intelligent as your average flying invertebrate?
When I go to donate blood, am I in a room of people being "Bled Alive"? Technically yes but there's a good reason that term is not used to draw people to donate blood, and is also rather a bit much in this case too.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I would call it "post-modern" if we had figured out how to synthesize coagulogen in the lab - negating the need for harvesting horseshoe crabs. Pssst, don't spread the word about GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) was discovered.
Why is this on Slashdot? This was news in the 1970's. Did some shill get an article published?
feast on THEIR eggs
A small amount of blood is taken in a very careful manner, after which the creatures are released back into the sea. This harvesting is done only on adults, and iirc only once per year or so.
These creatures are carefully caught and put in a device where a small amount of blood is drawn, similar to when a human donates blood. then they are carefully put back into the sea. This harvesting is done only once per year or something like that.
Horseshoe crabs are now grossly over fished; some for medical and some for eel bait. The rarer they get, the higher the price and the more fishermen want them, thus resulting is a crash.
The crash destroyed the food supply of a rare shorebird called the Red Knot that depends on horseshoe crab eggs in the Spring during their migration. So they arrive exhausted and hungry in the DelMar area, but there is now no food. So the population of Red Knots has crashed.
I see nothing in the first link that suggests that horseshoe crabs are endangered.
Quite frankly, I would be surprised if they were even close. Multitudes wash up on the beaches in SW Florida routinely after high tide.
"This is exactly what those environmentalists should be spending their time on: Finding ways to use nature against other forms of nature that are inconvenient to man."
Do you mean it's described in meaningless subjective polysyllabic dialog and the results are a social construct?
Surely NOT. This is a scientific result. Rational, objective and modernist to the core.
Luckily, the litmus test for the health of a species isn't whether or not some dude says "I see a bunch in this one place".
"Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic: 'The marvelous thing about horseshoe crab blood, though, isn't the color."
I'd suggest color be damned, the marvelous thing about them is that their blood isn't iron based, but copper based; 1 - a clear proof of convergent evolution; 2 - just really damn neat; and, 3 - proof that Spock, having deep green blood, must not be from a species that uses copper as a blood base (a fantastic way to make diehard trekkies squirm).
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I remember watching an environmental video in 1994 or so that featured the horseshoe crab for precisely this reason. They're actually a remarkable creature - I think they're only indigenous to the Delmarva region and they're basically living fossils. The blood is collected without harming the crab.
From a lab tech's point of view, LAL testing is brilliant. Mix 10mL of some sample that's supposedly "clean" into a premade LAL test kit. Snap the lid shut. Shake. Incubate for a day. If it changes color, it's positive for endotoxins. If it stays clear, it's negative. Simple as that. And being that the sensitivity is picograms/mL, it's great. Knowing the backstory is neat, too, from the tech's view. Which I am.
Chris Knight is my hero.
Seriously? Such an enlightened attitude.
Actually one of the strongest memories I have as a young child was coming across a horseshoe crab at a beach, it was in shallow water -- and it both scared the sh*t out of me, and had me intensely fascinated for a good long while. When an adult picked it up so I could see its underside and all those moving legs, I was absolutely, positively, enthralled. Nothing forgettable about it...
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
Well I am sorry but the wikipedia article for the horshoe crab found off the Atlantic and gulf coasts state that they are not presently endangered.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Litmus test doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Yeah... It does...
litmus test ...
2. Fig. A question or experiment that seeks to determine the state of one important factor. His performance on the long exam served as a litmus test to determine whether he would go to college. The amount of white cells in my blood became the litmus test for diagnosing my disease.
However I would submit that anyone using the phrase, "I see a bunch in this one place," would fail the litmus test regarding whether or not he's qualified to diagnose the health of a species.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Horseshoe crabs have been around for more than 400 million years. There are not many limbed animals that have survived with mostly the same design for that long. They are a wonder of nature. In the tech world, they would be roughly comparable to IBM System/360-dirived mainframes....except they still have the same horse-power, or should I say horse-shoe power.
Table-ized A.I.
I haven't been to the doctor in well over a year, and it was a year old National Geographic that I read this in at the time.
Get with the times and pick up a magazine for the latest news!
Here's how it went down...
Every year since before I was born the horseshoe crabs have swarmed and spawned. Big Business (in the form of the tourism industry) hated this and encouraged farmers to grind them up for fertilizer - they literally ran heavy equipment up and down the beach scraping up the crabs, and farmers lined up with their trucks to take the crabs away and run them through grinders. Naturally, tax dollars funded a lot of this.
Then somebody found a pharma use for their blood.
Between the farmers, the hotels, and the pharma boys the crabs started getting killed faster than they breed... at which point Big Pharma had laws passed. (The only reason Delaware politics aren't considered outrageously corrupt is because New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland are right next door - everything's relative.) Now the hotels are out of the harvesting picture entirely (they push the crab spawning as a "nature tourism" event instead) and the farmers' harvests are strictly limited, and Big Pharma uses sustainable harvesting (bleeding) practices.
Totally true story. I was there for the whole thing, I played with horseshoe crabs as a child in the 1960s and I still live in the area.
So yes, they were very briefly endangered, but aren't any more. Because GOVERNMENT - otherwise it would have gone totally "tragedy of the commons" like silphium did. Suck that slashdot Randroids!
I am from South Jersey ... Stay away from our crabs. They are ours. Go Away!!
Piney
Litmus test doesn't mean what you seem to think it means.
Gee, why bother with a dictionary, when you can just link to "Litmus_test_(politics)" on wikipedia to try to make your erroneous point?
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
harvesting and habitat destruction have reduced its numbers at some locations and caused some concern for this animal's future.
So okay, not technically endangered, by the scientific definition, but certainly the "near threatened" status would suggest that it's a good idea to not just kill them indiscriminately. In fact, wouldn't that be a good idea regardless?
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
I would have spelled it 'idiosyncrosy'. Thanks for teaching me something, slashdotters!
Would completely useless without the medicine in the needle
no, their talking about the eggs over there
LAL is obtained from the animals' blood. Horseshoe crabs are returned to the ocean after bleeding, although some 3% die during the process. Studies show the blood volume returns to normal in about a week, though blood cell count can take two to three months to fully rebound.[24]
So three percent of them die, Frankly I am not that worried about that.
It would be 'them there' eggs for that use case.
In American, at least.
Then it would make sense for the pharma companies to set up horseshoe crab farms where the crabs are raised specifically for their blood. That would also allow them to know exactly when blood was last collected from a batch of crabs.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
only south americans speak like that
"The blood is collected without harming the crab." Except, of course, for the (self-reported) 10-30% that TFA says die from the procedure or those females with potentially altered fertility. At least synthesised alternatives are in the (patent-encumbered) mill so the critters can just be left in peace.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
I grew up near the South Jersey shore and have seen Horseshoe Crabs in real life on the beach many times. They are funky looking, but these are some serioulsy old life forms. They also were already having population problems because of people destroying their habitat when I moved from New Jersey 20+ years ago. This things have lived for millions of years, so these guys can bleed them dry to test liquids? WTF?
"because we harvest the blood of a forgettable sea creature"... said the narcissistic a-hole who deserves the same treatment. I also find it interesting when I hear/read people use the term harvest for animals as they try to make what they are doing seem somehow less violent or painful for the things being killed.
These crabs are not super big. I can not expect they have a ton of blood in them. So they have a very good way of defending against bacterial infection. Great for them. Unfortunately dumb humans are the things killing them off. I was pretty happy tonight till I read this article.
They place them on your face where they attach themselves but eventually fall off. Your blood is highly acidic then but it kills all bacteria and viruses.
But by trying to keep the world the same as it was 30 years ago we will invariably cause other species to die out and stop the evolution of other species that are better adapted to current conditions. My biggest, and basically only, issue with 'conservationism' is that is anti-change for anti-change's sake. Why are we re-introducing some animals to areas where they died out hundreds of years ago but not ones that died out thousands or millions of years ago? It's arbitrary nonsense to pretend that the world should look like it did at another point in time.
All that said, I'm for minimising our impact on the environment where practical, and to a greater extent than we currently do, but mainly because I don't want us to screw it up too badly not because I care whether Pandas die out.
How many fisherman can I catch with a Horse Shoe crab?
No, I understand entirely that they're not killing them. I say that's a good thing. I'm also not worried about 3% of them dying as that certainly seems reasonable when compared against the benefits of harvesting their blood. I was merely commenting on the fact that you seemed to be representing their status as not endangered at all - when that's the only sentence you write, you come off as someone that's annoyed by the fact that we're not just killing them, instead of the catch-and-release that actually is going on.
If I was incorrect about your point of view, I apologize, but maybe next provide a little more context - that way you won't have to jump down someone's throat and start typing in all caps like a 12-year-old.
I've learned that they're worthless, so I don't read AC comments anymore.
Southerners, not South Americans. One is in the south end of the North American continent (not including Mexico), the other is a completely different continent which is south of the equator.
As to horseshoe crabs, they are facinating creatures. When I was growing up, one of my brothers had the remains of one, amazingly well preserved (I guess that might happen with an exoskeleton). For what it is worth, the remains were found already dead on the beach. Once you got over the "fishy" smell, one could look at all the structures of the creature, or at least the external ones. It was years later, as an adult, that I first saw one alive at an aquarium. Other than the fact that it moved, there was no visible difference.
Ok, the above sounds rather stupid, but this is all relating to my memories as a less-than 8-year-old.
My hope is that the fact that there is a living harvest element will promote their protection/conservation (or whatever the right word is for not killing them).
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
What is more remarkable, is that these creatures have been around for hundreds of millions of years, almost unchanged. They only seem to have grown tails over this period.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
If endanger species followed the free market, the demand for this treatment (if it was worthwhile) would drive people to farm them.
And then they wouldn't be endangered anymore.
This was already tried by the Japanese in the 60's with alarming results.
I would seriously discourage the US scientist of continuing with their experiments.
Here you can see a documentary about the experiments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
-- 29A the number of the Beast
The OP didn't quote the part of the Atlantic article that explained what the adaptation of the gel that forms from Horseshoe Crab blood is for. It sounds roughly analogous to what blood clotting in many animals does to protect them from infection from an open wound. It is the same sort of thing. The blood, blue because many crustacians use Cu instead of Fe in the O binding protein of their blood, protects the relatively open circulatory system of these arthropods from bacteria.
Back in the day, Cambrian day, the animals like these were trilobites that were fed upon by predators that could crack the exoskeleton with pincers and claws to eat the soft parts within. That risk along with incidental puncture of the exoskeleton would make the circulation vulnerable to pathogens, so that even if you survived an accident the breach in your armor might kill you from infection, so that explains the adaptation.
So, why are these blue bloods, using Cu instead of Fe, which makes our blood red? This is true of lobsters as well. The arthropods appeared in the Earliest Cambrian although there is evidence for them before the Cambrian Explosion. There is a beast in the Edicarian Fauna of Australia that has the same three part body plan of the trilobites and ultimately the horseshoe crab, and most of the extant isopoda, including the pill bug. These animals might have been around in the late Precambrian. Although this is well after the Fe was oxidized out of the oceans, causing the worldwide ironstone, banded iron deposits. Their blood may have evolved to use the more soluable salts of Cu. The problem is the protean that uses Cu is less effective than Hemoglobin, that uses Fe, for carrying O in the blood. The arthropods we know retained the ancestral material because they were not so active as to need the more efficient protean in their blood.
t's a good idea to not just kill them indiscriminately
Did not lead me to believe you understood entirely. So yes I did type that part in caps to emphasize that fact. I will keep it in mind to use the bold tags in the future.
I do not condone just killing animals for no reason, but killing 3% of the horeshoe crabs (for a good reason) does not even show up on my radar. My main point with the one liner is that they are not nearly as endangered/threatened as the person I was replying to had implied.
If the animals were actually endangered I would not be in favor of catching wild ones, but I would probably be in favor of trying to breed them in some sort of horeshoe crab farm if that was possible. Shoot maybe they even taste good.