DISAPPEARING BIODIVERSITY Part 3. HORSESHOE CRABS AND US

                                 Are we going to be in trouble when they are all gone?

The relationship between horseshoe crabs, humans and many shore birds beautifully exemplifies how all living species in nature are interrelated for survival. Furthermore, the disappearance of biodiversity eventually would threaten the other living creatures in the Nature.

Ancient and primitive creatures horseshoe crabs have lived for 475 years, but today they are on the verge of extinction because of human exploitation. In medicine, an extract obtained from the horseshoe crabs’ blue blood is used to detect a deadly contaminant called exotoxin in all injectable medications and implantable devices.

Endotoxins are present in the cell wall of certain bacteria and released when bacterial wall is damaged with serious consequences like septic shock and death. Pharmaceutical and implantable devices companies must test their products for endotoxin before they are released. Around 70 million tests a year is used for this purpose. There is no known natural or man-made substance to be used for this purpose.

A cloned alternative called” synthetic rFC “was finally manufactured in 2003 and in 2013. But still no standards have been established by the US Pharmacopeia and FDA for its use.

Horseshoe crabs are also harvested on world-wide basis for food, as well as used as baits in the fishing industry. In the US alone, fishermen take more than 1.4 million horseshoe crabs each year.

Spring is the spawning season for horseshoe crabs. They gather in huge numbers on the beaches to lay their eggs. Fishermen easily collect them from the beaches or scrape them from the seafloor with trawls.

It is no surprise that as a result, horseshoe crab number are drastically declining. This also threatens migratory shore birds like Red Knots, which depend on consuming horseshoe crab eggs to complete their epic migration from South America to the Arctic.

Relying on an ancient crab for endotoxin test is not sustainable. It is imperative that synthetic testing for endotoxin with rFC be improved and standardized, so that the lives of horseshoe crabs and many shore birds could be saved, and biodiversity can be protected.

For further reading on this topic, I recommend The Narrow Edge by Deborah Cramer.