• 0 Posts
  • 4 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
Cake day: December 4th, 2025
  • LostGhost@piefed.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Yay, milkshakes!English
    10·
    3 days ago

    I mean yeah but all species of horseshoe crabs only live in three places on earth. I can only speak for limulus polyphemus, which only lives on the East Coast of the US (from the Gulf of Mexico to Maine), but I’m not sure how much other species are even bled. Actually to be honest I’m not even sure they have the same extra cellular protein that is collected from the blood… Possibly should look into that. Maybe I could get some funding to travel to Indonesia for blood samples.

  • LostGhost@piefed.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Yay, milkshakes!English
    292·
    3 days ago

    I’m not sure it is unfortunate in all ways. There are more protections for horseshoe crabs now then there was before we had a medical need for them. While it would be nice to not bleed them at all anymore I worry that all their protection would be removed once we don’t “need” them. Ecologically they are very important to migrating birds but I don’t see the current people in power caring about that. At least since they are needed they are somewhat protected.

  • LostGhost@piefed.socialtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Yay, milkshakes!English
    100·
    3 days ago

    That is not all from one crab and they generally try not to kill the crabs. There is some debate on how many actually die with the companies bleeding them claiming almost none and some other people saying up to 60%, so the truth is probably in the middle in there.

    As far as keeping them alive in a tank it’s not to hard. I have been working with them for a few years now and we have some at work. They mostly eat shrimp here not fish food. We have raised them from eggs. One of the big issues with raising them in captivity for the long term is we still are not sure how large chunks of their lifecycle works. For example while we have some ideas we do not have definitive proof of how they develop their sex. We think there are genetic factors but if I remember correctly there was a paper published a year or so ago that said there might be a temperature Factor, somewhat like turtles.

    Fun fact, they will not eat micro plastics. We had an undergrad doing an experiment to see if they would eat micro plastics and how it would pass through their system but we were never able to get them to even ingest any.