Every day in vibrant medical rooms in nations all around the world, horseshoe crabs are strapped into specifically designed harnesses and drained of a 3rd of their blood by folks in lab coats. Then they’re put again into rivers and oceans to swim-scuttle out their days.
Horseshoe crabs are prehistoric they usually look it: a fossilised Roomba a lot of the method by way of consuming a stingray. The horseshoe crab appears primarily prefer it shouldn’t be alive proper now.
They’re about 20 cm throughout and twice that size together with their tails, and belong in museum dioramas, not the ocean – or the brilliant medical rooms. They belong on dusty papier-mache painted to appear like rocks or in strong resin water, not strapped into excellent rows in vibrant rooms stuffed with metal.
It is just while you see the shell moist from the water, shut up, that you recognize they’re actual and alive; their shells are stunning and finely cracked, a patch of darkish olive on an outdated portray.
The blood. It’s milky blue. And like no different substance it rapidly, precisely detects toxins that may contaminate drugs. That is how we acquired right here: half 1,000,000 horseshoe crabs are caught and bled in laboratories yearly. Under them within the harnesses are giant glass jugs. Even the jugs appear unusual, homely nearly.
How do the crabs get there? They aren’t residing in tanks. No, males in peak caps and cargo shorts, in atypical human garments, go to the ocean at evening and yank the crabs from the water by their tails, chucking them right into a pile on a ship.
Then they’re chucked into vehicles and pushed to the bleeding amenities. To get the blood, a needle is injected by way of a hinge within the crab’s shell and right into a membrane operating alongside its coronary heart (its coronary heart is formed like a caterpillar).
“Anybody who will get a flu or Covid shot, childhood immunisation, coronary heart stent or hip alternative – and that’s nearly everybody – is protected by [a test made using] the blue blood of the horseshoe crab,” in accordance with Deborah Cramer, who has written a ebook about horseshoe crabs and the birds that eat their tiny inexperienced eggs.
The eggs: they’re laid in a spawning occasion of tens of millions of crabs over hundreds of kilometres, females climbing the seashore pushed by waves and pulling the males connected to their backs. They’ve been doing this at full moon and excessive tide since earlier than dinosaurs. By the sunshine of the moon, they appear like a whole bunch of military helmets deserted on the sand – till a wave flips one over, and also you see legs flailing within the moonlight.
Magnified, wedged between biscuit-coloured grains of sand, the eggs grow to be clear eggshells holding small inexperienced creatures, which with their gently convex shells appear to please in somersaulting towards a concave wall. They don’t know that of the entire a whole bunch of tens of millions of years they might have been born, with the entire issues occurring round them, they have been born on this age; that they’ll meet vampires and dwell (most of them do, anyway) to inform the story.
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Helen Sullivan is a Guardian journalist. Her first ebook, a memoir referred to as Freak of Nature, might be revealed in 2024
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Have an animal, insect or different topic you’re feeling is worthy of showing on this very severe column? Electronic mail helen.sullivan@theguardian.com