Horseshoe crab blue blood contains cells, widely used by the medical industry, that can easily detect bacterial contamination. But this animal, a true living fossil, is now threatened with extinction.
She looks so much like a monster that it was she who inspired the creators of the “Alien” saga. But we have nothing to fear from the horseshoe crab, an arthropod descended from an animal that appeared hundreds of millions of years ago. Better, it has a unique feature to protect us from serious infections: its blue blood is a very effective indicator of the presence of bacteria and it is massively used by biomedical firms which screen vaccines, intravenous fluids, drugs or medical instruments to detect the presence of potentially fatal agents for humans.
If the horseshoe crab has blue colored blood, it is because it contains hemocyanin which replaces the hemoglobin present in the blood of most other species. Thanks to this feature, this blood reacts in the presence of bacteria by producing horseshoe crab amebocyte lysate (LAL), a substance widely used in the pharmaceutical field to test the absence of pathogens such as Escherichia coli or salmonella in drugs. , dialysis products or medical and surgical equipment.
10,000 euros per liter of blue blood
Suffice to say that this blue blood is worth gold. Demand has pushed its price up to 10,000 euros per litre! As a result, the animal has become highly coveted. Alone, reports the newspaper The world, the American pharmaceutical industry extracts 430,000 horseshoe crabs a year, particularly along the east coast of the United States. And these removals have reached such a level that the animal is now threatened with extinction and has been placed on the list of vulnerable species of the Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), in the same way as the tiger or Panda !
30% of the blood of the animals collected is taken in the laboratory from their heart organ and the live horseshoe crabs are then returned to the water. But this process still leads to the death of 5 to 20% of these arthropods and the females that survive also have more difficulty reproducing. Worse, the Asian branch of the animal pays an even heavier price since horseshoe crabs are sold there as food after the collection of their blood.
An estimated 60% drop in their population
The value of their blood is not the only threat to these friendly “aliens”: the decrease, linked to human activity, in the number of beaches available to lay their eggs and the development of toxic algae also contribute to a decrease estimated at 60% of their population, according to a UN report to be published in April 2019.
The pharmaceutical industry is trying to find synthetic substitutes for the blue blood of horseshoe crabs, but none of these products has yet been approved by the health authorities.
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