It's blue, baby blue.
February 27, 2014 2:38 AM   Subscribe

 
Half way through the article I had to check, because I thought I may have fallen
prey to the Onion...but no.. Amazing!
posted by quazichimp at 3:49 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


Reminds me a lot of Scalzi's "Smart Blood". I've not read a lot of sci fi with body mods so it's possible I've missed other examples ...
posted by tilde at 3:57 AM on February 27, 2014


Do they feel pain when bled?
posted by orme at 4:05 AM on February 27, 2014 [3 favorites]


When they want to mate, they swim into very shallow water, and horseshoe crab collectors wade along, snatching the crabs out of their habitat.
. . .
Bleeding a female horseshoe crab may make it less likely to mate, even if it doesn't kill it.
Can't imagine why.
We can imagine that it's like us giving blood.
Yes, we can imagine it's like us giving a third of our blood to giant flesh-bag aliens with big needles. But I bet they're like lobsters and don't feel any pain ...
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:21 AM on February 27, 2014 [7 favorites]


There are birds that subsist on horseshoe crab eggs during their migration. The fewer horseshoe crabs, the fewer birds.

All things are connected.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:27 AM on February 27, 2014 [10 favorites]


The biomedical collectors are not the first to make use of the crabs' bodies. As far back as colonial times, "cancerine fertilizer" was used to enrich fields. In the 20th century, though, this became an organized industry around the Delaware Bay. The crabs were steamed and then ground into meal for the fields. Others were fed to hogs. Millions of crabs were harvested.

Yet two recent studies estimate that between 10% and 15% of crabs do not survive the bleeding procedure, which accounts for the mortality of 20,000 to 37,500 horseshoe crabs per year.

Compared to how these animals were treated in the past, I guess this is an improvement, but still it seems quite an unfriendly way for the newcomers to treat a species that is 450m years old.

Next time some mysterious blood disease emerges amongst humans, I know where I would cast a glance.
posted by three blind mice at 4:41 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


I came here to post that they look like Ferengi Marauders, then I thought that was a bit of a pointless comment so I went and googled it to see if anyone else had noticed the similarity.

Apparently I have it the wrong way round:

"The Ferengi Marauder's shape was inspired by a horseshoe crab on the desk of writer Herb Wright. The model itself was designed by Andrew Probert (who added the forward "earwig" pincers) and built by Greg Jein. (Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, p. 38)"

(alright, alright D'Kora class)
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 4:42 AM on February 27, 2014 [8 favorites]


In other Star Trek related news, I remember the explanation for Spock's blood being green was that Vulcan blood used copper instead of iron to transport oxygen. As a kid, I remember thinking that set up was highly unlikely. Yet, here is an animal that does just that, and hence, blue blood. Amazing! Also, creatures that have been around for half a billion years relatively unchanged -- that's amazing in itself. It wasn't that long ago that humans ancestors resembled hedge hogs.

Also, the workers in the photo, I don't envy them.
posted by jabah at 4:50 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


Eventually, we'll have the bioengineering to replicate the machinery in the horseshoe crab that converts nutrients to the chemicals in its blood which we find useful, without the attendant inefficiency of making horseshoe crabs and having to catch them. See also: meat, milk, eggs and other things we need inefficient mechanisms ("animals") to produce.
posted by acb at 5:14 AM on February 27, 2014 [5 favorites]


But harvests picked back up in the 1990s, when fishermen realized they could use the crabs as bait for catching large snails called whelk

Once more, a glimpse into teh Whelk's personal life that leaves me awed and appalled.

And... a little intrigued.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:18 AM on February 27, 2014 [15 favorites]


See also: meat, milk, eggs and other things we need inefficient mechanisms ("animals") to produce.
Haha, what? If animals are inefficient, just what the hell is efficiency? Matter/antimatter reactions?
posted by kavasa at 5:50 AM on February 27, 2014 [6 favorites]


Decades ago my family took advantage of cheap rates to visit pre-development Cancun. We stayed in a cheezy pre-fab motel whose beach was not suitable for swimming. It was, however, suitable for the huge horseshoe crabs I found in the shallows.

I had never seen large horseshoes alive, though I had seen many dead ones. I wasted no time in picking one up and taking it into our unit where I let it run around in the bathroom to my own delight and my parents' disgust.

I was amazed by its weight--it was incredibly heavy for its size--and the strength of that tail, which it can use to right itself. When I returned it to the water, watching it scuttle away felt pre-historic and astounding.

A decade or so after that I learned that a cousin, whose work is all top-secret government medical cloak-and-dagger creepy-scary stuff, was sent to Woods Hole to study horseshoe crab blood for doubtlessly some nefarious purpose which she could not discuss.

Poor crabs. It does not always pay to have blue blood.
posted by kinnakeet at 5:52 AM on February 27, 2014 [6 favorites]


The blood is blue, you say? *strokes chin* Well, I guess now we know how MetaFilter can afford to pay such awesome moderators without carpeting the page with ads.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:15 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


If animals are inefficient, just what the hell is efficiency? Matter/antimatter reactions?

My AP Bio teacher always like to drill into us that RuBisCO, the enzyme responsible for fixing carbon into carbohdrates in photosynthisis, is only effective at capturing 1-2% of the energy of the sun.

Think about this for a minute.

Every blade of grass, slick of algae, tiny bug, giant predator—any food chain dependent on photosynthetic organisms (which is basically all of them) come from this humble, inefficient protein. 1% of the sun's energy, plus the matter we happened to have laying around on the planet is responsible for all the diversity of our world.

So yes, animals and biological life is very inefficient, but that has been sufficient for our needs. Should we manage to not annihilate ourselves in the next few thousand or ten thousand years we will undoubtedly invent more efficient methods of harnessing the sun's energy. Just imagine what we could do with a mere 5%? What new worlds could we make?
posted by fontophilic at 6:17 AM on February 27, 2014 [10 favorites]


I want to apologize for confusing the noble The Whelk for the perfidious teh Whelk, his internet evil twin. I deeply regret any inconvenience, distress, or confusion this error may have caused.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:17 AM on February 27, 2014 [3 favorites]


Makes you wonder...who bleeds us?
posted by oceanjesse at 6:17 AM on February 27, 2014


Mosquitos, bedbugs, all sorts of things.
posted by Ham Snadwich at 6:20 AM on February 27, 2014 [6 favorites]


Politicians, marketers, scammers and thieves.

Oh, and Wall Street. But perhaps I repeat myself.
posted by darkstar at 6:34 AM on February 27, 2014 [7 favorites]


Haha, what? If animals are inefficient, just what the hell is efficiency? Matter/antimatter reactions?

Animals are efficient as competitive survival/reproduction machines. They're inefficient as a way of turning nutrients into meat/eggs/crab enzymes, or whatever end product us parasitic humans use them for.

A hypothetical optimal crab-enzyme-production machine would not incur the cost of having armour, a nervous system, reproductive organs, or the myriad other necessities of surviving autonomously in a semi-hostile environment.
posted by acb at 6:41 AM on February 27, 2014


Walter White wept.
posted by digitalprimate at 6:51 AM on February 27, 2014


This is amazing, and I had no idea. Thanks for posting it.
That said, I take umbrage to the writer describing horseshoe crabs as forgettable. I grew up on the water and horseshoe crabs never lost their luster for me. I still get excited showing them to my nieces and nephews.
posted by staccato signals of constant information at 6:54 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


Metafilter: There's no such thing as free horseshoe crab blood.
posted by Danf at 7:06 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


This seems unnecessarily cruel and sadly there's no opt-out if you participate in the mainstream medical system. I'd gladly pay extra to have medications/devices certified using an artificial equivalent once it's available.
posted by tommasz at 7:33 AM on February 27, 2014




Fascinating.

I can see why it's been hard to replicate the process though - if the enzyme reacts so violently upon contact with bacteria (and presumably yeast) then our mainline model organisms to study protein production would be severely limited. I wonder how well you could express it in Sf9 cells? Hm.
posted by maryr at 7:51 AM on February 27, 2014


Why do I feel like I just watched Starship Troopers?
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:08 AM on February 27, 2014 [3 favorites]


After the biomedical horseshoe crab collectors get them back to a lab, they pierce the tissue around the animals' hearts and drain up to 30 percent of the animals' blood. The LAL is extracted from the blood, and can go for $15,000 per quart. Only five companies bleed the crabs: Associates of Cape Cod, Lonza, Wako Chemicals, Charles River Endosafe, and Limuli Labs (which does not have a website).

The horseshoe crabs are returned to the ocean a great distance from where they were initially picked up to avoid rebleeding animals. The whole process takes between 24 and 72 hours.

The industry says that not that many of the animals die. Between 10 and 30 percent of the bled animals, according to varying estimates, actually die. We can imagine that it's like us giving blood. The crabs get some apple juice and animal crackers and are fine soon thereafter
.

Will no one spring for some donuts?
posted by St. Peepsburg at 8:11 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


They attached accelerometers to female horseshoe crabs that had been bled for our benefit.

You should hear the UFO abduction stories the horseshoe crabs tell each other. The accelerometers and bleeding are nothing compared to the probes.
posted by Nelson at 8:17 AM on February 27, 2014 [6 favorites]


No "this kills the crab" jokes? Sometimes I feel like I don't even know you any more, Mefi.
posted by alby at 8:53 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


Skuttly the crab returns to the Undersea Bureau of Investigation with a strange implant, feeling sluggish and sick, and she *still* doesn't believe in the existence of human beings. Molter the crab grows frustrated with her stubbornness.
posted by Mooseli at 9:25 AM on February 27, 2014 [17 favorites]


Makes you wonder...who bleeds us?

Given our history, our present, and our future, we ourselves.
posted by juiceCake at 9:28 AM on February 27, 2014 [3 favorites]


Someday they will have their horrible, horrible revenge. That will be a bad day to live by the seashore.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:31 AM on February 27, 2014 [2 favorites]


but mirelurk cakes are tasty, gottabefunky
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 10:35 AM on February 27, 2014


"Just imagine what we could do with a mere 5%?"

I do believe that is known as cancer, at least to the non-medical layperson.

Look, I get it, this idea that being more efficient means you can do more work for less fuel. But that isn't how biology works. You have to factor in a lot of other really important things, like homeostatis, cellular equilibrium, and heat dissipation, just to name some of the really weird factors that most people don't really pay attention to when talking about living organisms. You also have to figure out if the increased efficiency is in whole organism, or just in the individual cells, because then you get into the sticky fun time of calculating how efficient the Krebs cycle is gong to be for actual ATP production and the oxidation of glucose in glycolysis, or if you are just slowing down the rate of ATP consumption, versus actually increasing "efficiency" by maintaining the same consumption rate and increasing the amount of energy consumed. But wait, there's more. What if efficiency means more power per unit of energy consumed?

Oh, and speaking of cycles. Does the increased efficiency mean faster or slower cellular replacement? How does this affect the over-all health of the entire system, if cells are living longer and the replacement rate remains the same? Oh, right, that's the cancer thing again.

So now I'll actually talk about the article.

What I find interesting is that we are talking about harvesting a rather rudimentary immune system response from a half-billion year old organism, because our own immune system is so vastly different, and our current methods of detecting bacterial infections are pretty slow and not very efficient (there's that word again), at least for business/commercial purposes of getting products to market past the FDA (which is a good thing, really). I would also love it if they could make a tooth-paste out of this stuff (or something similar), that could help remove bacteria from areas of the body.
posted by daq at 10:36 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


staccato signals of constant information: "That said, I take umbrage to the writer describing horseshoe crabs as forgettable. I grew up on the water and horseshoe crabs never lost their luster for me. I still get excited showing them to my nieces and nephews."

Me too. I learned to love handling them at the "live table" at an aquarium when I was a kid, totally fascinated by their taranta-like bodies underneath those massively heavy shells. (I'm surprised that the article didn't explicitly note that they're not crabs...and not even crustaceans.)
posted by desuetude at 11:45 AM on February 27, 2014 [1 favorite]


This is a pretty incomplete article.

First, there's a nonanimal replacement for the LAL and rabbit pyrogen test (RPT) that's been accepted by US and EU regulators following product-specific validation. It's been available for regulatory use in the US since 2009 (earlier in the EU), and is even printed in the FDA guidance on the subject.

These in vitro pyrogen tests (IPT), also called monocyte activation tests (MAT), all rely on the same principle--human blood cells release measurable amounts of interleukins in response to pyrogens. The advantage with the IPT/MAT approach is that they're immediately more human-relevant (being based on the molecular initiating events of the human febrile response), and the human response isn't limited to the (bacterial) endotoxin to which LAL is sensitive.

Likewise, the article gives the impression that the pharma industry has moved away from the RPT. It hasn't. The LAL isn't compatible with everything that's required to be tested for pyrogenicity, and in those instances the RPT is still the regulatory fall-back requirement.

Unfortunately, the problem here is the same as with almost all nonanimal methods that are validated for use as replacements for old-fashioned animal toxicology and safety tests: industry doesn't implement them without some impetus to do so. In the EU there's a legal mandate to use alternatives when they're available (Directive 2010/63/EU, which superseded Directive 86/609/EEC). In the US, no such requirement exists, so companies drag their feet. All the development of new, improved methods is meaningless unless they're actually put into use, and the US regulatory structure is still struggling to figure out how to change things. For the time being (and I mentioned this in a comment yesterday), a lot of this impetus is coming from published work and corporate liaising on behalf of a lot of NGOs and research institutes outside the regulatory structure itself.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 11:52 AM on February 27, 2014 [7 favorites]


I would also love it if they could make a tooth-paste out of this stuff (or something similar), that could help remove bacteria from areas of the body.

Since they say the stuff gels up when it detects bacteria, it seems like making toothpaste of it would just gum up your, uh, gums.
posted by maryr at 3:01 PM on February 27, 2014


No "this kills the crab" jokes? Sometimes I feel like I don't even know you any more, Mefi.

alby, this is always my MeFi crab goto.
posted by maryr at 3:03 PM on February 27, 2014


This Woodshole Marine Lab page, with its subsequent pages, is a pretty good writeup about horseshoe crab blood.
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:05 PM on February 27, 2014


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