Popular Mechanics - USA (2019-09)

shoe crabs is much higher (more like 29 percent), that

females may have an impaired ability to spawn, and

that bled crabs become disoriented and debilitated for

various lengths of time, Novitsky says. In Pleasant Bay

on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where horseshoe crabs

are known to be bled for biomedical use, he says fewer

females are spawning than in other regions.

“There’s been a dramatic effect,” Novitsky says.

“The industry will unite and say these studies were

done in a lab, and you can’t compare that with what’s

done in nature, but that argument doesn’t hold water.”

Restricting the biomedical harvest is no easy task,

and it starts with the red tape. According to Schmidtke,

the stock assessments (a measure of how many crabs

are out there in the first place) only began taking the

biomedical crab harvest into account last year.

But getting a more accurate count is only part of the

equation. Even if there were a quota, there’s no guaran-

tee that the organization could enforce it. First there’s

the question of authority. “ASMFC has no jurisdiction

over the biomedical industry. It’s not a fishery. It’s like

ASMFC trying to monitor the tobacco industry,” says

Jeff Brust, a research scientist with the New Jersey

Department of Environmental Protection.

And then there’s the pure damn necessity. Several

companies have come up with synthetic alternatives

for detecting the presence of endotoxins in vaccines,

medicine, and instruments, using a compound called

recombinant factor C (rFC). But for now, LAL is still

the FDA’s preferred method for detecting endotoxins.

“There are other tests out there, but since the FDA at

one point told people that LAL was the definitive test,

people are too afraid to use another test for fear it will

negatively impact their FDA approval,” says Lindsay

Marjoram, Ph.D., a scientist at Powered Research, a

research lab in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

While pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly used an rFC

method for endotoxin testing of its migraine drug,

Emgality, to date that is the only drug approved by the

FDA to use rFC instead of LAL, even though the syn-

thetic test has been available since 2003.

“Yeah, probably the real story is why persist with

the harvesting when modern recombinant methods

are available,” said Kevin Williams, a scientist at the

French company bioMérieux, one of two that manufac-

ture rFC. (The other is the Switzerland-based Lonza.)

Part of the problem is that one of the large bleeding

labs has actively tried to undermine the alternatives,

saying they don’t work, Williams says.

“[I’ve seen] full-page ads against rFC saying it can’t

detect. Data shows it does. They ignore it,” he says.

The Stress

IT’S HARD ENOUGH on a creature to lose a large quan-

tity of blood and then survive in the wild. But that’s

only part of the problem. According to scientists

like Owings and Watson, there’s a growing body of

evidence that factors related to the capture and trans-

portation are hurting the crabs, too.

“I imagine when you put them back in the water, if

you were to measure their breathing rate, it would be

intense,” Watson says, noting that their time spent out

of the water has probably made them anaerobic for a

while. “If I was put through a period where I couldn’t

breathe, and you put me back where you found me, I’d

just sit there and breathe for a day.”

Watson says the companies catch so many crabs at

one time that they can’t keep them in tanks. There’s

just too many. And so the catchers just pile crabs out

on the deck of the boat.

“Name me another marine creature who breathes

underwater who can survive on land the way they can,”

Watson says. “You can’t do that with a fish, or a lob-

ster. They’re very hardy. But I think they pay a price

for that.”

The firms involved in this fishing will say they use

best management practices in their harvesting, but

it’s totally voluntary, open-ended, and vague, Novitsky

says, which isn’t surprising. The rules were put for-

ward by representatives of the LAL labs, which sit

on ASMFC’s committees. ASMFC has best practices

spelled out, but they have neither enforcement nor sur-

veillance capabilities.

“I was getting directives from the ownership that

we weren’t profitable enough, and you know how that

goes,” said Novitsky, who was pushed out of Cape Cod

Associates after it was acquired by a Japanese firm.

Owings and Watson say they don’t want to stop bio-

29

Cost of a quart
of crab blood 575,000

Number of horseshoe

crabs the biomedical

industry bleeds annually

for LAL testing

Percentage

of crabs that

scientists

estimate may

be dying after

being bled

Percent by

which the

horseshoe

crab popu-

lation is predicted to

decrease over the next

four decades

Annual

growth of

the medical

device market in the

Americas, leading to an

increased demand for

$15,000 (^) horseshoe crab blood
6.4%
30
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