The headline left out something important from the article and posed a false dichotomy, a minority of harvested crabs are being used to develop medicines, and most of those are released and survive. The vast majority that are killed are being harvested for use as bait in commercial fishing. Seems like that’s the obvious thing to cut back on to save the humans, the crabs, and the birds.
Also, it looks more like climate change is what’s fucking over the spawning of horseshoe crabs. Not blood harvesting. Eggs need a specific temperature to survive.
Blue blood from a horseshoe crab yes. Blue crabs are also a thing and horseshoe crabs are always referred to with the word horseshoe in front. So calling them just crabs with the word blue in front is a poor choice if one cares about communication.
I'm sorry but, was the whole successfully cloning animals thing just a fever dream? Is there a reason we can't be doing that for something like this? (Disclaimer: am stupid, pls ELI5)
Cloning is not a magical tool with scifi vats etc it’s taking dna and placing it in an embryo and puting it back in an animal womb, here breeding would be more on point. But I too am stupid, this is my take on it from what I know.
Ideally we should find a replacement for that horseshoe crab blood or perhaps a way to raise them in captivity. Maybe someone could come up with something to give the crabs to offset the damage caused by taking the blood. The issue might not even be primarily due to the blood with everything else happening climate change wise.
There might be ways to improve things for the birds but animals with super specific niches just kinda run the risk of becoming extinct. I feel similar about Pandas and Koalas.
"A synthetic alternative was later invented and has since been approved in Europe as an equivalent to the ingredient that requires horseshoe crabs. But in the U.S., the blood harvest isn't shrinking. It's growing." - source
To be honest, I too headed straight for the comments without reading the article. But I didn’t comment till I read it. It’s also not technically a crab either, despite being called one.
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