Science vs. Greed=Climate Change: ‘Crab Wars’ by William Sargent

Artists are on the front lines imaging ambiguities of our fragile Earth and its inhabitants: verbally or figuratively. Beachcombers usually experience dead Horseshoe crabs washed ashore in tangled seaweed. They walk-on in search of the perfect shell, until reading ‘Crab Wars: A Tale of Horseshoe Crabs, Ecology, and Human Health” by William Sargent. Bill Sargent, a consultant for the NOVA Science Series, has been director of the Baltimore Aquarium, and a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution research assistant. As a boy, summering on Pleasant Bay, located on Cape Cod’s Atlantic rim as it turns northward, Sargent acquired a love for ecology, intertwined in the eel grasses of salty wafting marshes.

Horseshoe crabs (in this essay crab means Horseshoes) are actually not crabs, but arachnids. They go back 450 million years and lay thousands of eggs/mate on sand, when the moon is full and the tides are high (25-26). North American Horseshoe crabs are found from Maine to the Yucatán Peninsula; some consider them mere shellfish predators (9, 56). Native Americans and Colonial farmers used crabs for fertilizer and chicken feed (67).

By 1950, Horseshoe crab populations had severely declined, even before anyone thought of catching them for medical purposes. In 1977, crabs in Delaware Bay rebounded because the fertilizer industry had stopped using them (68). Fluctuations occur, but the specie is on a downward trajectory.

Sargent writes “over a million human lives have been saved by the horseshoe crab test, and the processed blood of these animals is worth $15,000 a quart. It is used to detect infinitesimally small quantities of Gram-negative bacteria, which are as ubiquitous in the natural environment as they are lethal in the human bloodstream. The Food and Drug Administration now requires that every scalpel, drug, syringe and flu shot be tested with the horseshoe crab derivative called ‘Limulus’ amoebocyte lysate, LAL, or lysate for short (3).” This amazing discovery occurred but not without ongoing fallout.

In the early Sixties scientists: Drs. Betsy Bang and Jack Levin, working with Horseshoe crab blood at Woods Hole Oceanographic ‘discovered a new way to test for bacteria (36)’. Crabs would replace rabbits bred to be injected with potentially bad bacteria (42). In 1977, the FDA began licensing lysate, the lucrative by-product of Horseshoe crab blood–identifies deadly Gamma-negative bacteria (52).

Soon pharmaceutical laboratories were popping-up away from beach shack labs adjacent to crab habitats: Cape Cod and Chincoteague Island (44). Sometimes crabs were transported, other times just their blood was shipped for processing (56). An early FDA mandate requiring all Horseshoe crabs be returned to native waters could be easily ignored. ‘Handling, shipping, and bleeding’ often kills crabs. (58). Rationalizations--it was time consuming and costly.With dwindling Horseshoe crabs in Pleasant Bay, a convenient arena for Woods Hole scientists to extract species, Sargent along with students instigated a program which would return crabs into the Bay after having been bled (42). Others transferred crabs from one source to another to compensate declining populations(94-95).

Like the plant in ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ (1982), which needed incessant feeding, so did the Horseshoe crab industry. Both fisherman (some legitimate, others interstate poachers) and conservationists played upon a metaphorical seesaw, often winding up in front of commissions (79-85). The Eighties saw Delaware Bay ‘blue-crab fisherman and oyster dredgers’ using Horseshoe crabs as cheap bait (68). For years Cape Cod-er Jay Harrington made a decent wage catching crabs for a lysate company (86-87). Jim Finn, a biologist and small LAL company owner “realized that collecting horseshoe crabs for both lysate and bait could have a serious impact on the future of Delaware Bay (79).” Catch 22: Feds handed out low-interest loans, encouraging fisherman to catch ‘underutilized’ species like Horseshoe crabs (72).

Like the farmer and cowman not being friends in ‘Oklahoma’ (1943), both scientists and fisherman were causing environmental snafus, competing for the same crabs. Both were circumventing mandates by way of irregular trafficking: off-hour trucking and off-loading vessels at unrestricted ports (83). Legal disputes involving fisherman, who wanted no catch limitations, and laboratories that wanted more and more crabs for bleeding transpired (80).

Federal regulators eventually created the Carl Shuster (pioneering Post-war biologist) 1,500 square mile-sanctuary in the Delaware Bay (71,114). In the early 2000s, a Massachusetts ruling created reserves in both Cape Cod’s Pleasant (National Seashore) and Monomoy (National Wildlife Refuge) Bays, but allowed some commercial catching of Horseshoe crabs in parts of Monomoy (102). Sadly, pharmaceutical companies continue to rely on trucking crabs from faraway locales, often damaging animals before processing. Many never get put back into the ocean after bleeding, becoming bait instead (104). However, there continues to be pressure to make fisherman stop using crabs for bait (114).

Sargent writes, “By 2000 over 2.3 million horseshoe crabs were being harvested every year for bait, and the East Coast population was starting to decline, as it had in the 1800s….A Horseshoe crab is worth exponentially more over its lifetime when used for lysate than if it was killed and chopped up for bait at 75¢ a pound (71).”

Enter migratory Red Knots, with a flight pattern from Tierra del Fuego lowlands to the Arctic Circle. In early March each bird eats 135,000 Horseshoe crab eggs off Delaware Bay beaches before flying to the Arctic to nest (75). Diminishing crabs translates to a decline in eggs, which normally feed migrating Red Knots, who now fly North malnourished, or die in the process (115).

In 2003 Dr. Ling Jack Ding working at the National University of Singapore patented synthetic lysate (122). Sargent writes, when Coronavirus erupted in 2020, “blood-based antibody tests were the gold standard (127).” Horseshoe crabs were really needed to test Coronavirus vaccine batches, so using synthetics for testing bacteria has been tabled (128).

Sargent remarks, “[Horseshoe crabs] saw dinosaurs come and go and they saw a spindly-legged primate rise up to dominate the world in a most alarming manner….The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has declared Horseshoe crabs an endangered species, but in the light of the present COVID pandemic isn’t it humans who appear to be more ill-equipped to survive such a viral storm (137-139)?”

Many Climate Change actualities don’t affect people’s daily lives because what happens is--out of sight/out of mind. The Horseshoe crab story can be appreciated while sketching or strolling on a beach, or when getting Covid vaccinations to survive this pandemic.

Mini Sleuth: ‘Crab Wars: A Tale of Ecology, and Human Health’ by William Sargent is at Amazon. Thank you, Sue Ramin at Brandeis University Press.

Jean Bundy-mfa, phd is a writer/painter in Anchorage. She is a VP for AICA-International (art critics), and shows art at Pictor Gallery NYC.