PORTLAND, Maine. A primordial sea animal that lives on the tidal mudflats of the East Coast and serves as a linchpin for the production of vital medicines stands to benefit from new protective standards.
But conservationists who have been trying for years to save a declining bird species — the red knot — that depends on horseshoe crabs fear the protections still don’t go far enough.
Drug and medical device makers are dependent on the valuable blue blood of the crabs — helmet-shaped invertebrates that have scuttled in the ocean and tidal pools for more than 400 million years — to test for potentially dangerous impurities. The animals are drained of some of their blood and returned to the environment, but many die from the bleeding.
Recent revisions to guidelines for handling the animals should keep more alive through the process, regulators said. The animals — not really true crabs but rather more closely related to land-dwelling invertebrates such as spiders and scorpions — are declining in some of their East Coast range.
“They were here before the dinosaurs,” said Glenn Gauvry, president of Ecological Research & Development Group, a Delaware-based nonprofit that advocates for horseshoe crab conservation. “And they’re having problems because the new kids on the block, us, haven’t learned to appreciate the elders.”
Gary P Hernal started college at UP Diliman and received his BA in Economics from San Sebastian College, Manila, and Masters in Information Systems Management from Keller Graduate School of Management of DeVry University in Oak Brook, IL. He has 25 years of copy editing and management experience at Thomson West, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters.
