Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's
Speaker 1: Chuck and there's Jerry over there, and this is short stuff,
Speaker 1: so we should probably get talking about this right away.
Speaker 1: What are we talking about right now, Chuck? We're talking
Speaker 1: about an ancient primitive animal, a beast that was around
Speaker 1: before dinosaurs, that survived ice ages, and that has been
Speaker 1: virtually unchanged since they made their way onto the scene.
Speaker 1: It's a little horseshoe crabs. Little horseshoe crabs still around,
Speaker 1: still kicking, still virtually unchanged after I think I saw
Speaker 1: about four hundred and fifty million years. Yeah, and still
Speaker 1: when you're when you have a child or when you
Speaker 1: were a child, when you go to the beach and
Speaker 1: you see one for the first time, the question what
Speaker 1: in the world is that? To your parents? Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they say stop asking questions. They're crazy looking. They really
Speaker 1: are crazy looking. It looks like, um, how do you
Speaker 1: how do you describe a horseshoe crab? Do you think
Speaker 1: it looks over a wooden bowl and gave it a tail? Okay, great,
Speaker 1: we'll go with that. But it also has like a
Speaker 1: it's really tough exoskeleton. It's got six legs. If it's
Speaker 1: a male. The front two legs or hooks, because it
Speaker 1: uses those for mating, and the legs look like, you know,
Speaker 1: little crab claws. Yeah, And so it looks like a freaky,
Speaker 1: scary little thing. Even though it's called the horseshoe crab,
Speaker 1: it's actually much more closely related to spiders and scorpions.
Speaker 1: And once you realize that number one, what it looks
Speaker 1: like makes sense number two, it becomes maybe the most
Speaker 1: terrifying thing you've ever seen in your life in person.
Speaker 1: They're not gonna hurt you, though they're friendly. They are,
Speaker 1: they're fine. They don't want anything to do with you.
Speaker 1: There too, they're they're old souls. They've been around too
Speaker 1: long to mess with you. But we humans like to
Speaker 1: mess with them. And there's a reason why. The reason
Speaker 1: is because they have a very peculiar kind of blood.
Speaker 1: It's copper based actually, so it's blue. And back in
Speaker 1: the fifties a guy named fred Bang. Frederick Bang figured
Speaker 1: out at you can use horseshoe crab blood to identify
Speaker 1: whether there's harmful bacteria is present, and say like a
Speaker 1: biological sample, a medical device, UM, a vaccine, a new drug,
Speaker 1: and UM. With that I think twenty years later it
Speaker 1: got FDA approval to use it for that use. It
Speaker 1: just began a horseshoe crab harvesting bananza. All right, so
Speaker 1: we'll explain how that all works here in a sec.
Speaker 1: But um, let's talk a little bit more about the
Speaker 1: body of these guys and gals. Like we said, they
Speaker 1: have a big head. It's called a prosoma, and in
Speaker 1: that head is the brain in the heart, which is
Speaker 1: super cool. You already mentioned the six little claw legs. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in the males, the very first pair are like hooks,
Speaker 1: and they used to clamp onto the female during mating.
Speaker 1: And uh, this is how that happens. The ladies dig
Speaker 1: a hole in the sand lay had several thousand eggs,
Speaker 1: and the ale hooks in clings to her back and
Speaker 1: fertilizes these eggs. And the coolest thing about all this
Speaker 1: is there are other males sort of in the area,
Speaker 1: kind of hanging around, and they're like, hey, if you know,
Speaker 1: if you've done, if you've done your thing, maybe give
Speaker 1: me a shot. Right that guy he was he was
Speaker 1: a real jerk, wasn't he. I'm a nice guy. They're
Speaker 1: called satellite males. Yeah, but this you know, the females
Speaker 1: can do this a few times per night for several
Speaker 1: nights in a row, and all in all, a breeding
Speaker 1: female can lay out about a hundred thousand eggs a season,
Speaker 1: which is great to be like, great, we're in the
Speaker 1: horseshoe crabs the world, is say, fantastic, But they also
Speaker 1: um are a delicacy for shore birds who fly up
Speaker 1: and down the the eastern coast to the of North
Speaker 1: America of the Iraq, and they eat tons of these eggs.
Speaker 1: So even though a female might might um have like
Speaker 1: ten thousands of these and there might be a million
Speaker 1: mating pairs of horseshoe crabs in a single place, a
Speaker 1: lot of the get eaten by birds. Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1: if you've ever been to Delaware Bay or seen pictures
Speaker 1: of just type in Delaware Bay horseshoe crabs, it's like
Speaker 1: a beach made of horseshoe crabs during mating season, right,
Speaker 1: so remarkable. So the horseshoe crabs can deal with the
Speaker 1: shore birds. It's fine. They've they've been around for a
Speaker 1: very long time um and shorebirds have to so they've
Speaker 1: learned to just kind of live with it. The problem
Speaker 1: is is we humans have a big impact on horseshoe
Speaker 1: crabs as well. We like to catch them and use
Speaker 1: them for bait, and we also develop in the areas
Speaker 1: where they mate and reproduce, and so we eat up
Speaker 1: their habitat. So when you put those together with shore
Speaker 1: birds eating thousands and thousands and thousands of of eggs
Speaker 1: that could have been a little tiny new horseshoe crabs,
Speaker 1: their population has um. It's under strain. And that's just
Speaker 1: the population of the United States. It's actually far worse
Speaker 1: in Asia. Yeah, and you know what, let's take a break.
Speaker 1: We'll talk a little bit about how they benefit the
Speaker 1: humans and what's going on in America with this research
Speaker 1: and in Asia. Right after this m m okay choke,
Speaker 1: we're back. So I think I mentioned that you can
Speaker 1: actually use horseshoe crab blood to um in the biomedical industry.
Speaker 1: It's it's virtually priceless, although there is a price for it.
Speaker 1: It's just really expensive. It's dollars a court, making it
Speaker 1: one of the most valuable fluids on Earth. And this
Speaker 1: is specifically the clotting agent that's that expensive. It's called
Speaker 1: l A l uh limitless or lime less amba site
Speaker 1: LI sate and it is in their blue blood, and
Speaker 1: it is a preme clouding agent, as it turns out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the reason why it's a great clouding agent is
Speaker 1: because that's how horseshoe crabs fend off infection on their
Speaker 1: own um and your body. You have white blood cells,
Speaker 1: and you have all sorts of veins that your body
Speaker 1: can kind of close off and surround a foreign invader
Speaker 1: or pathogen in right, Well, blood just flows freely all
Speaker 1: throughout the horseshoe crab. The blood vessels, they don't. It's
Speaker 1: just kind of moves through their tissues and their organs
Speaker 1: and everything. It's just it just slashes around everywhere and
Speaker 1: they're pick one up and shake it. You'll hear it
Speaker 1: just plain Now. I don't do that. But the the
Speaker 1: fact that the blood can just move around very easily
Speaker 1: means that they have to have a very specialized type
Speaker 1: of blood cell that can do everything. So I guess
Speaker 1: it's a generalized type of blood cell if you think
Speaker 1: about it. And that's what they have. And these blood cells,
Speaker 1: when they encounter a pathogen, they clock like crazy around
Speaker 1: that thing because that is their immune response. They basically
Speaker 1: sequester it in a big gob of goog a gobba goom. Right,
Speaker 1: So we figured out that we could use this l
Speaker 1: a l. And the way that we originally um started
Speaker 1: harvesting this was from rabbits, because I guess rabbits have
Speaker 1: I don't think as much, right, Well, they don't have
Speaker 1: specifically the same thing, and we didn't harvest it from him.
Speaker 1: We would just inject them with a drug that we
Speaker 1: were testing and see if they got an infection, and
Speaker 1: then whether they did or not, we just kill them
Speaker 1: when we were done with them anyway, gotchas. So the
Speaker 1: fact that we are able to use horseshoe crabs has
Speaker 1: saved rabbit lives. Yes, we can feel good about that
Speaker 1: on one hand, Um, but here's the deal. Horshoe crabs
Speaker 1: can survive about four days out of the water. So
Speaker 1: if you want to harvest this crab blood or this
Speaker 1: spider scorpion blood, you pick one of these horseshoe crabs up.
Speaker 1: They like females because they're much bigger. I don't think
Speaker 1: we said they can be UM much much larger than
Speaker 1: the males, like by half I think, yeah, larger. And
Speaker 1: so they bring them out, they bring them to the lab,
Speaker 1: they chill them for an hour, put them on ice.
Speaker 1: Then they mount them to Iraq and keep in mind
Speaker 1: they're alive this whole time, and they insert a needle
Speaker 1: around the heart into that tissue and they drain about
Speaker 1: thirty of the blood from these horseshoe crabs and try
Speaker 1: and get them back in time to survive. Um, it
Speaker 1: looks like, like I said, four days out, they can
Speaker 1: survive I imagine, probably less in a traumatic situation like this,
Speaker 1: But they like to get about a what survival rate,
Speaker 1: I mean, they want even higher than that. But what
Speaker 1: it washes out too, is that they have about about
Speaker 1: a third, about thirty of the horseshoe crabs that they
Speaker 1: harvest and put back end up dying. And they think
Speaker 1: that it's not the blood lighting process. They've got the
Speaker 1: blood the bleeding process down pretty well down to a science. Basically,
Speaker 1: it's how how they're caught, transported and handled during this
Speaker 1: process that can kill them. That they think that that's
Speaker 1: usually what kills them. UM. So, if you're if you're
Speaker 1: talking about like six hundred thousand horseshoe crabs being harvested
Speaker 1: every year in the United States alone, of that, that's
Speaker 1: a lot of dead horseshoe crabs that would otherwise still
Speaker 1: be alive. That and this is the point I mean,
Speaker 1: aside from the fact that we're killing horseshoe crabs for
Speaker 1: our own purposes. Um, if we if those things survived,
Speaker 1: they regenerate their blood and we can bleed them again.
Speaker 1: It's not like a once in a lifetime thing. And
Speaker 1: they tag them so that they don't over bled them
Speaker 1: too much. But um, the you know, thirty percent of
Speaker 1: them dying, that's a that's a big problem because that's
Speaker 1: just a big loss of that blood market down the line. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's about a hundred and eighty thousand a year in
Speaker 1: the US that are not surviving. Uh. And we mentioned
Speaker 1: before the break that it's worse in Asia, and that's
Speaker 1: because in places like Singapore they do the same thing,
Speaker 1: except when they bleed them out, they then sell them
Speaker 1: as food, so they don't return them to the ocean
Speaker 1: at all at all. They eat. Um. There was an
Speaker 1: expert on this who said that at this rate, in
Speaker 1: a decade, the other three. That's so North America has
Speaker 1: one species of horseshoe crab. The other three on Earth
Speaker 1: all live in Asia, and those species may be extinct
Speaker 1: within a decade because of those practices. Yeah, and this
Speaker 1: is interesting. I don't know anything about these kind of processes,
Speaker 1: but um, they are making synthetic L A L. They've
Speaker 1: been doing it for about fifteen years. But there's only
Speaker 1: one company and one facility that was doing this. And
Speaker 1: I never knew that that was a big deal, but
Speaker 1: it makes sense now if you're if you're a biomedic company,
Speaker 1: and there's only one facility producing this, you can't just say,
Speaker 1: all right, we're scrapping all of the harvesting because we're
Speaker 1: gonna use some synthetic L A L. Only what if
Speaker 1: something happens to that company, you're back to square one
Speaker 1: exactly well exactly for sure. And I think that's that's
Speaker 1: wise because from what I understand, if if L A
Speaker 1: L just the supply of L A L right now,
Speaker 1: like the biomedical industry would just stop because they have
Speaker 1: to test this stuff. You can't put like a pacemaker
Speaker 1: inside a human being with it potentially covered or infected
Speaker 1: with some sort of bacteria that could kill the person
Speaker 1: who received the pacemaker. So you have to test some
Speaker 1: of this stuff in the way that they tested by
Speaker 1: exposing it to this L A L. So if you
Speaker 1: don't have the L A L, people don't get their pacemakers,
Speaker 1: and the whole industry is grinds to a hall. So
Speaker 1: it would definitely make sense because if you have one
Speaker 1: factory producing this stuff and the thing gets hit by
Speaker 1: a hurricane or tornado or something like that, that's it.
Speaker 1: But more and more people are starting to make the
Speaker 1: synthetic L A L. So it looks like within just
Speaker 1: a few years the horseshoe crabs might start to be
Speaker 1: left alone. Yeah, which is good for them. That'd be great,
Speaker 1: I think so too. Let's push for it, Chuck, we'll
Speaker 1: make it an s Y s K initiative. Let's create
Speaker 1: a hashtago save the horseshoe crab. That's a long hashtag. Okay,
Speaker 1: but you two can save a horseshoe crab. If you're
Speaker 1: ever walking along the beach. They have something called a tellson.
Speaker 1: That's our little spiky tail that they use to flip
Speaker 1: themselves over if they have flipped over the wrong way,
Speaker 1: which would be legs up. If you happen to see
Speaker 1: a horseshoe crab alive though, and their little arms are
Speaker 1: wiggling and there Tellson's not flipping them over. Do so yourself.
Speaker 1: Don't grab him by the telson that should be a
Speaker 1: stuffs in that t shirt. Grab him on the sides.
Speaker 1: Just pick them up on the sides, flip them over.
Speaker 1: Uh maybe in the water, and they will be eternally grateful.
Speaker 1: I couldn't imagine they would be. They'd be like, thank
Speaker 1: you so much. And then they swim about five ft
Speaker 1: and someone grabs them and takes them to the horror
Speaker 1: show for the blood lighting. Well, maybe at least you
Speaker 1: did your part. Yeah, that's good advice, Chuck. And since
Speaker 1: we don't have anything else to say about horseshoe crabs,
Speaker 1: then this short stuff is out Adios. Stuff you Should
Speaker 1: Know is a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows. H