August 21, 2019 • 13 mins
Perhaps the most expensive liquid on the planet is the blue blood that comes from horseshoe crabs. Researchers realized that horseshoe crab blood could indicate the presence of pathogens and the massive, ongoing horseshoe crab harvest began.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and there's Jerry over there, and this is short stuff,
so we should probably get talking about this right away.
What are we talking about right now, Chuck? We're talking
about an ancient primitive animal, a beast that was around
before dinosaurs, that survived ice ages, and that has been
(00:25):
virtually unchanged since they made their way onto the scene.
It's a little horseshoe crabs. Little horseshoe crabs still around,
still kicking, still virtually unchanged after I think I saw
about four hundred and fifty million years. Yeah, and still
when you're when you have a child or when you
were a child, when you go to the beach and
(00:45):
you see one for the first time, the question what
in the world is that? To your parents? Yeah, and
they say stop asking questions. They're crazy looking. They really
are crazy looking. It looks like, um, how do you
how do you describe a horseshoe crab? Do you think
it looks over a wooden bowl and gave it a tail? Okay, great,
we'll go with that. But it also has like a
(01:07):
it's really tough exoskeleton. It's got six legs. If it's
a male. The front two legs or hooks, because it
uses those for mating, and the legs look like, you know,
little crab claws. Yeah, And so it looks like a freaky,
scary little thing. Even though it's called the horseshoe crab,
it's actually much more closely related to spiders and scorpions.
And once you realize that number one, what it looks
(01:29):
like makes sense number two, it becomes maybe the most
terrifying thing you've ever seen in your life in person.
They're not gonna hurt you, though they're friendly. They are,
they're fine. They don't want anything to do with you.
There too, they're they're old souls. They've been around too
long to mess with you. But we humans like to
mess with them. And there's a reason why. The reason
is because they have a very peculiar kind of blood.
(01:50):
It's copper based actually, so it's blue. And back in
the fifties a guy named fred Bang. Frederick Bang figured
out at you can use horseshoe crab blood to identify
whether there's harmful bacteria is present, and say like a
biological sample, a medical device, UM, a vaccine, a new drug,
(02:15):
and UM. With that I think twenty years later it
got FDA approval to use it for that use. It
just began a horseshoe crab harvesting bananza. All right, so
we'll explain how that all works here in a sec.
But um, let's talk a little bit more about the
body of these guys and gals. Like we said, they
(02:35):
have a big head. It's called a prosoma, and in
that head is the brain in the heart, which is
super cool. You already mentioned the six little claw legs. Uh.
And in the males, the very first pair are like hooks,
and they used to clamp onto the female during mating.
And uh, this is how that happens. The ladies dig
a hole in the sand lay had several thousand eggs,
(02:59):
and the ale hooks in clings to her back and
fertilizes these eggs. And the coolest thing about all this
is there are other males sort of in the area,
kind of hanging around, and they're like, hey, if you know,
if you've done, if you've done your thing, maybe give
me a shot. Right that guy he was he was
a real jerk, wasn't he. I'm a nice guy. They're
(03:20):
called satellite males. Yeah, but this you know, the females
can do this a few times per night for several
nights in a row, and all in all, a breeding
female can lay out about a hundred thousand eggs a season,
which is great to be like, great, we're in the
horseshoe crabs the world, is say, fantastic, But they also
um are a delicacy for shore birds who fly up
(03:41):
and down the the eastern coast to the of North
America of the Iraq, and they eat tons of these eggs.
So even though a female might might um have like
ten thousands of these and there might be a million
mating pairs of horseshoe crabs in a single place, a
lot of the get eaten by birds. Yeah. I mean,
(04:02):
if you've ever been to Delaware Bay or seen pictures
of just type in Delaware Bay horseshoe crabs, it's like
a beach made of horseshoe crabs during mating season, right,
so remarkable. So the horseshoe crabs can deal with the
shore birds. It's fine. They've they've been around for a
very long time um and shorebirds have to so they've
learned to just kind of live with it. The problem
(04:22):
is is we humans have a big impact on horseshoe
crabs as well. We like to catch them and use
them for bait, and we also develop in the areas
where they mate and reproduce, and so we eat up
their habitat. So when you put those together with shore
birds eating thousands and thousands and thousands of of eggs
that could have been a little tiny new horseshoe crabs,
(04:43):
their population has um. It's under strain. And that's just
the population of the United States. It's actually far worse
in Asia. Yeah, and you know what, let's take a break.
We'll talk a little bit about how they benefit the
humans and what's going on in America with this research
and in Asia. Right after this m m okay choke,
(05:29):
we're back. So I think I mentioned that you can
actually use horseshoe crab blood to um in the biomedical industry.
It's it's virtually priceless, although there is a price for it.
It's just really expensive. It's dollars a court, making it
one of the most valuable fluids on Earth. And this
is specifically the clotting agent that's that expensive. It's called
(05:51):
l A l uh limitless or lime less amba site
LI sate and it is in their blue blood, and
it is a preme clouding agent, as it turns out. Yeah,
And the reason why it's a great clouding agent is
because that's how horseshoe crabs fend off infection on their
own um and your body. You have white blood cells,
(06:11):
and you have all sorts of veins that your body
can kind of close off and surround a foreign invader
or pathogen in right, Well, blood just flows freely all
throughout the horseshoe crab. The blood vessels, they don't. It's
just kind of moves through their tissues and their organs
and everything. It's just it just slashes around everywhere and
they're pick one up and shake it. You'll hear it
(06:32):
just plain Now. I don't do that. But the the
fact that the blood can just move around very easily
means that they have to have a very specialized type
of blood cell that can do everything. So I guess
it's a generalized type of blood cell if you think
about it. And that's what they have. And these blood cells,
when they encounter a pathogen, they clock like crazy around
(06:52):
that thing because that is their immune response. They basically
sequester it in a big gob of goog a gobba goom. Right,
So we figured out that we could use this l
a l. And the way that we originally um started
harvesting this was from rabbits, because I guess rabbits have
(07:13):
I don't think as much, right, Well, they don't have
specifically the same thing, and we didn't harvest it from him.
We would just inject them with a drug that we
were testing and see if they got an infection, and
then whether they did or not, we just kill them
when we were done with them anyway, gotchas. So the
fact that we are able to use horseshoe crabs has
saved rabbit lives. Yes, we can feel good about that
(07:33):
on one hand, Um, but here's the deal. Horshoe crabs
can survive about four days out of the water. So
if you want to harvest this crab blood or this
spider scorpion blood, you pick one of these horseshoe crabs up.
They like females because they're much bigger. I don't think
we said they can be UM much much larger than
the males, like by half I think, yeah, larger. And
(07:57):
so they bring them out, they bring them to the lab,
they chill them for an hour, put them on ice.
Then they mount them to Iraq and keep in mind
they're alive this whole time, and they insert a needle
around the heart into that tissue and they drain about
thirty of the blood from these horseshoe crabs and try
and get them back in time to survive. Um, it
(08:17):
looks like, like I said, four days out, they can
survive I imagine, probably less in a traumatic situation like this,
But they like to get about a what survival rate,
I mean, they want even higher than that. But what
it washes out too, is that they have about about
a third, about thirty of the horseshoe crabs that they
(08:39):
harvest and put back end up dying. And they think
that it's not the blood lighting process. They've got the
blood the bleeding process down pretty well down to a science. Basically,
it's how how they're caught, transported and handled during this
process that can kill them. That they think that that's
usually what kills them. UM. So, if you're if you're
(09:00):
talking about like six hundred thousand horseshoe crabs being harvested
every year in the United States alone, of that, that's
a lot of dead horseshoe crabs that would otherwise still
be alive. That and this is the point I mean,
aside from the fact that we're killing horseshoe crabs for
our own purposes. Um, if we if those things survived,
(09:23):
they regenerate their blood and we can bleed them again.
It's not like a once in a lifetime thing. And
they tag them so that they don't over bled them
too much. But um, the you know, thirty percent of
them dying, that's a that's a big problem because that's
just a big loss of that blood market down the line. Yeah,
that's about a hundred and eighty thousand a year in
the US that are not surviving. Uh. And we mentioned
(09:45):
before the break that it's worse in Asia, and that's
because in places like Singapore they do the same thing,
except when they bleed them out, they then sell them
as food, so they don't return them to the ocean
at all at all. They eat. Um. There was an
expert on this who said that at this rate, in
a decade, the other three. That's so North America has
(10:07):
one species of horseshoe crab. The other three on Earth
all live in Asia, and those species may be extinct
within a decade because of those practices. Yeah, and this
is interesting. I don't know anything about these kind of processes,
but um, they are making synthetic L A L. They've
been doing it for about fifteen years. But there's only
(10:28):
one company and one facility that was doing this. And
I never knew that that was a big deal, but
it makes sense now if you're if you're a biomedic company,
and there's only one facility producing this, you can't just say,
all right, we're scrapping all of the harvesting because we're
gonna use some synthetic L A L. Only what if
something happens to that company, you're back to square one
(10:49):
exactly well exactly for sure. And I think that's that's
wise because from what I understand, if if L A
L just the supply of L A L right now,
like the biomedical industry would just stop because they have
to test this stuff. You can't put like a pacemaker
inside a human being with it potentially covered or infected
(11:11):
with some sort of bacteria that could kill the person
who received the pacemaker. So you have to test some
of this stuff in the way that they tested by
exposing it to this L A L. So if you
don't have the L A L, people don't get their pacemakers,
and the whole industry is grinds to a hall. So
it would definitely make sense because if you have one
factory producing this stuff and the thing gets hit by
a hurricane or tornado or something like that, that's it.
(11:33):
But more and more people are starting to make the
synthetic L A L. So it looks like within just
a few years the horseshoe crabs might start to be
left alone. Yeah, which is good for them. That'd be great,
I think so too. Let's push for it, Chuck, we'll
make it an s Y s K initiative. Let's create
a hashtago save the horseshoe crab. That's a long hashtag. Okay,
(11:57):
but you two can save a horseshoe crab. If you're
ever walking along the beach. They have something called a tellson.
That's our little spiky tail that they use to flip
themselves over if they have flipped over the wrong way,
which would be legs up. If you happen to see
a horseshoe crab alive though, and their little arms are
wiggling and there Tellson's not flipping them over. Do so yourself.
(12:20):
Don't grab him by the telson that should be a
stuffs in that t shirt. Grab him on the sides.
Just pick them up on the sides, flip them over.
Uh maybe in the water, and they will be eternally grateful.
I couldn't imagine they would be. They'd be like, thank
(12:41):
you so much. And then they swim about five ft
and someone grabs them and takes them to the horror
show for the blood lighting. Well, maybe at least you
did your part. Yeah, that's good advice, Chuck. And since
we don't have anything else to say about horseshoe crabs,
then this short stuff is out Adios. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
(13:03):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Hey, and welcome to short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and there's Jerry over there, and this is short stuff,
so we should probably get talking about this right away.
What are we talking about right now, Chuck? We're talking
about an ancient primitive animal, a beast that was around
before dinosaurs, that survived ice ages, and that has been
(00:25):
virtually unchanged since they made their way onto the scene.
It's a little horseshoe crabs. Little horseshoe crabs still around,
still kicking, still virtually unchanged after I think I saw
about four hundred and fifty million years. Yeah, and still
when you're when you have a child or when you
were a child, when you go to the beach and
(00:45):
you see one for the first time, the question what
in the world is that? To your parents? Yeah, and
they say stop asking questions. They're crazy looking. They really
are crazy looking. It looks like, um, how do you
how do you describe a horseshoe crab? Do you think
it looks over a wooden bowl and gave it a tail? Okay, great,
we'll go with that. But it also has like a
(01:07):
it's really tough exoskeleton. It's got six legs. If it's
a male. The front two legs or hooks, because it
uses those for mating, and the legs look like, you know,
little crab claws. Yeah, And so it looks like a freaky,
scary little thing. Even though it's called the horseshoe crab,
it's actually much more closely related to spiders and scorpions.
And once you realize that number one, what it looks
(01:29):
like makes sense number two, it becomes maybe the most
terrifying thing you've ever seen in your life in person.
They're not gonna hurt you, though they're friendly. They are,
they're fine. They don't want anything to do with you.
There too, they're they're old souls. They've been around too
long to mess with you. But we humans like to
mess with them. And there's a reason why. The reason
is because they have a very peculiar kind of blood.
(01:50):
It's copper based actually, so it's blue. And back in
the fifties a guy named fred Bang. Frederick Bang figured
out at you can use horseshoe crab blood to identify
whether there's harmful bacteria is present, and say like a
biological sample, a medical device, UM, a vaccine, a new drug,
(02:15):
and UM. With that I think twenty years later it
got FDA approval to use it for that use. It
just began a horseshoe crab harvesting bananza. All right, so
we'll explain how that all works here in a sec.
But um, let's talk a little bit more about the
body of these guys and gals. Like we said, they
(02:35):
have a big head. It's called a prosoma, and in
that head is the brain in the heart, which is
super cool. You already mentioned the six little claw legs. Uh.
And in the males, the very first pair are like hooks,
and they used to clamp onto the female during mating.
And uh, this is how that happens. The ladies dig
a hole in the sand lay had several thousand eggs,
(02:59):
and the ale hooks in clings to her back and
fertilizes these eggs. And the coolest thing about all this
is there are other males sort of in the area,
kind of hanging around, and they're like, hey, if you know,
if you've done, if you've done your thing, maybe give
me a shot. Right that guy he was he was
a real jerk, wasn't he. I'm a nice guy. They're
(03:20):
called satellite males. Yeah, but this you know, the females
can do this a few times per night for several
nights in a row, and all in all, a breeding
female can lay out about a hundred thousand eggs a season,
which is great to be like, great, we're in the
horseshoe crabs the world, is say, fantastic, But they also
um are a delicacy for shore birds who fly up
(03:41):
and down the the eastern coast to the of North
America of the Iraq, and they eat tons of these eggs.
So even though a female might might um have like
ten thousands of these and there might be a million
mating pairs of horseshoe crabs in a single place, a
lot of the get eaten by birds. Yeah. I mean,
(04:02):
if you've ever been to Delaware Bay or seen pictures
of just type in Delaware Bay horseshoe crabs, it's like
a beach made of horseshoe crabs during mating season, right,
so remarkable. So the horseshoe crabs can deal with the
shore birds. It's fine. They've they've been around for a
very long time um and shorebirds have to so they've
learned to just kind of live with it. The problem
(04:22):
is is we humans have a big impact on horseshoe
crabs as well. We like to catch them and use
them for bait, and we also develop in the areas
where they mate and reproduce, and so we eat up
their habitat. So when you put those together with shore
birds eating thousands and thousands and thousands of of eggs
that could have been a little tiny new horseshoe crabs,
(04:43):
their population has um. It's under strain. And that's just
the population of the United States. It's actually far worse
in Asia. Yeah, and you know what, let's take a break.
We'll talk a little bit about how they benefit the
humans and what's going on in America with this research
and in Asia. Right after this m m okay choke,
(05:29):
we're back. So I think I mentioned that you can
actually use horseshoe crab blood to um in the biomedical industry.
It's it's virtually priceless, although there is a price for it.
It's just really expensive. It's dollars a court, making it
one of the most valuable fluids on Earth. And this
is specifically the clotting agent that's that expensive. It's called
(05:51):
l A l uh limitless or lime less amba site
LI sate and it is in their blue blood, and
it is a preme clouding agent, as it turns out. Yeah,
And the reason why it's a great clouding agent is
because that's how horseshoe crabs fend off infection on their
own um and your body. You have white blood cells,
(06:11):
and you have all sorts of veins that your body
can kind of close off and surround a foreign invader
or pathogen in right, Well, blood just flows freely all
throughout the horseshoe crab. The blood vessels, they don't. It's
just kind of moves through their tissues and their organs
and everything. It's just it just slashes around everywhere and
they're pick one up and shake it. You'll hear it
(06:32):
just plain Now. I don't do that. But the the
fact that the blood can just move around very easily
means that they have to have a very specialized type
of blood cell that can do everything. So I guess
it's a generalized type of blood cell if you think
about it. And that's what they have. And these blood cells,
when they encounter a pathogen, they clock like crazy around
(06:52):
that thing because that is their immune response. They basically
sequester it in a big gob of goog a gobba goom. Right,
So we figured out that we could use this l
a l. And the way that we originally um started
harvesting this was from rabbits, because I guess rabbits have
(07:13):
I don't think as much, right, Well, they don't have
specifically the same thing, and we didn't harvest it from him.
We would just inject them with a drug that we
were testing and see if they got an infection, and
then whether they did or not, we just kill them
when we were done with them anyway, gotchas. So the
fact that we are able to use horseshoe crabs has
saved rabbit lives. Yes, we can feel good about that
(07:33):
on one hand, Um, but here's the deal. Horshoe crabs
can survive about four days out of the water. So
if you want to harvest this crab blood or this
spider scorpion blood, you pick one of these horseshoe crabs up.
They like females because they're much bigger. I don't think
we said they can be UM much much larger than
the males, like by half I think, yeah, larger. And
(07:57):
so they bring them out, they bring them to the lab,
they chill them for an hour, put them on ice.
Then they mount them to Iraq and keep in mind
they're alive this whole time, and they insert a needle
around the heart into that tissue and they drain about
thirty of the blood from these horseshoe crabs and try
and get them back in time to survive. Um, it
(08:17):
looks like, like I said, four days out, they can
survive I imagine, probably less in a traumatic situation like this,
But they like to get about a what survival rate,
I mean, they want even higher than that. But what
it washes out too, is that they have about about
a third, about thirty of the horseshoe crabs that they
(08:39):
harvest and put back end up dying. And they think
that it's not the blood lighting process. They've got the
blood the bleeding process down pretty well down to a science. Basically,
it's how how they're caught, transported and handled during this
process that can kill them. That they think that that's
usually what kills them. UM. So, if you're if you're
(09:00):
talking about like six hundred thousand horseshoe crabs being harvested
every year in the United States alone, of that, that's
a lot of dead horseshoe crabs that would otherwise still
be alive. That and this is the point I mean,
aside from the fact that we're killing horseshoe crabs for
our own purposes. Um, if we if those things survived,
(09:23):
they regenerate their blood and we can bleed them again.
It's not like a once in a lifetime thing. And
they tag them so that they don't over bled them
too much. But um, the you know, thirty percent of
them dying, that's a that's a big problem because that's
just a big loss of that blood market down the line. Yeah,
that's about a hundred and eighty thousand a year in
the US that are not surviving. Uh. And we mentioned
(09:45):
before the break that it's worse in Asia, and that's
because in places like Singapore they do the same thing,
except when they bleed them out, they then sell them
as food, so they don't return them to the ocean
at all at all. They eat. Um. There was an
expert on this who said that at this rate, in
a decade, the other three. That's so North America has
(10:07):
one species of horseshoe crab. The other three on Earth
all live in Asia, and those species may be extinct
within a decade because of those practices. Yeah, and this
is interesting. I don't know anything about these kind of processes,
but um, they are making synthetic L A L. They've
been doing it for about fifteen years. But there's only
(10:28):
one company and one facility that was doing this. And
I never knew that that was a big deal, but
it makes sense now if you're if you're a biomedic company,
and there's only one facility producing this, you can't just say,
all right, we're scrapping all of the harvesting because we're
gonna use some synthetic L A L. Only what if
something happens to that company, you're back to square one
(10:49):
exactly well exactly for sure. And I think that's that's
wise because from what I understand, if if L A
L just the supply of L A L right now,
like the biomedical industry would just stop because they have
to test this stuff. You can't put like a pacemaker
inside a human being with it potentially covered or infected
(11:11):
with some sort of bacteria that could kill the person
who received the pacemaker. So you have to test some
of this stuff in the way that they tested by
exposing it to this L A L. So if you
don't have the L A L, people don't get their pacemakers,
and the whole industry is grinds to a hall. So
it would definitely make sense because if you have one
factory producing this stuff and the thing gets hit by
a hurricane or tornado or something like that, that's it.
(11:33):
But more and more people are starting to make the
synthetic L A L. So it looks like within just
a few years the horseshoe crabs might start to be
left alone. Yeah, which is good for them. That'd be great,
I think so too. Let's push for it, Chuck, we'll
make it an s Y s K initiative. Let's create
a hashtago save the horseshoe crab. That's a long hashtag. Okay,
(11:57):
but you two can save a horseshoe crab. If you're
ever walking along the beach. They have something called a tellson.
That's our little spiky tail that they use to flip
themselves over if they have flipped over the wrong way,
which would be legs up. If you happen to see
a horseshoe crab alive though, and their little arms are
wiggling and there Tellson's not flipping them over. Do so yourself.
(12:20):
Don't grab him by the telson that should be a
stuffs in that t shirt. Grab him on the sides.
Just pick them up on the sides, flip them over.
Uh maybe in the water, and they will be eternally grateful.
I couldn't imagine they would be. They'd be like, thank
(12:41):
you so much. And then they swim about five ft
and someone grabs them and takes them to the horror
show for the blood lighting. Well, maybe at least you
did your part. Yeah, that's good advice, Chuck. And since
we don't have anything else to say about horseshoe crabs,
then this short stuff is out Adios. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
(13:03):
For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. H
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com