Though about half a million horseshoe crabs are harvested every year, the need for their blood is declining since a substitution has been discovered. Still, a gallon of horseshoe crab blood costs $60,000

Depending on which state they're harvested in, the crabs are either taken by hand from the beaches or pulled up from the bottom of the ocean with nets. Hundreds are piled on top of each other in boats, loaded into trucks and delivered to bleeding facilities. There, lab technicians pierce the crabs through their hearts and drain them alive, sometimes for eight minutes, which can deplete them of more than half their volume of blue blood. In Massachusetts, some of the bled crabs are then sold to be killed and used as bait. In states like South Carolina and New Jersey, the animals are delivered back to the fishermen, who return them to the ocean.

That makes the bleeding business unique among the industries it straddles. It's an unusual fishery, because the animals are not sold to be eaten. It's an atypical utilization of animals in medicine, since the crabs are not bled in the research stage, and they're not warm-blooded. They're not even crustaceans — horseshoe crabs are more closely related to scorpions than they are to snow crabs.

Coastal biomedical labs are bleeding more horseshoe crabs with little accountability
 
By Chiara Eisner
Published June 10, 2023 at 8:19 AM EDT