“Trying,” she says.
The reboot works. As the data finishes downloading, Owings shouts,
“19,000!”—referring to the number of pings the receiver has picked up.
She removes the key and drops the device back into the water to continue
its task. The world needs that data.The Catch
THE ATLANTIC STATES Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), which
manages the fishery resources along the Atlantic coast, has harvest quo-
tas in place for bait fishermen who use horseshoe crabs to catch eels and
conch. But not for biomedical laboratories. They can take as many crabs as
they like, and that harvest continues to grow, rising from around 130,000
in 1989 to 483,245 in 2017, according to the ASMFC’s latest stock assess-
ment report. The biomedical labs also bleed some of the bait crabs, before
they’re chopped up and used to catch eels and conch, and that figure has also
risen, from 40,572 in 2004 to 95,231 in 2017, according to ASMFC data.
“The Commission currently does not have the authority to limit bio-
medical harvest. It would need to be granted that authority from the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration, since any limits on biomedical harvest
could potentially impact human health,” says Michael Schmidtke, Ph.D.,
the Fishery Management Plan Coordinator for ASMFC.
Thomas Novitsky, Ph.D., a scientist and former CEO of Associates of Cape
Cod, an LAL company in East Falmouth, Massachusetts, is more blunt.
“We were successful in exempting ourselves from quotas,” Novitsky
says. “We lobbied the ASMFC, telling them we’re not hurting the crabs.
We’re putting them back. We have a very important medical application
here, so give us a break and don’t put the regulations on us.”
The LAL labs argue that after the crabs are bled, they go back into the
water and recover. That assumption is now being questioned. The ASMFC’s
decision not to restrict the biomedical industr y assumed that some crabs,
about 15 percent, would die. But that threshold has been broken in the last
11 years. And evidence is accumulating that the death rate of bled horse-1 / Fishermen take
the crabs from the
water by trawl or
hand-harvest and
put them into con-
tainers on the boat.
Crabs are out of the water for 24 to 72 hours during the bleeding process,
during which they are vulnerable to heat and air exposure. Here’s what happens.A PERILOUS JOURNEY
2 / The con-
tainers are then
put into a truck
and driven to a
bleeding facility.3 / The crabs sit in
large containers for
an unknown period
of time, possibly
overnight, before
they are bled.4 / The crabs are
placed in racks and
stuck with a needle
and up to 30 per-
cent of their blood
is extracted.5 / After bleeding, the crabs
are put back into containers
where they can sit, possibly
overnight, before they are
returned to the water.September 2019 59