Niles and volunteers he organizes have been counting the horseshoe crab eggs since the 1980s and tagging birds since the 1990s. He tracks the health of red knots and horseshoe crabs and has organized a group called Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition to advocate for conservation measures. The birds need meaningful protection of horseshoe crab eggs to be able to recover, Niles said. Meanwhile, the population of the rufa red knot, the threatened subspecies, has declined by 75% since the 1980s, according to the National Park Service. The density of horseshoe crab eggs in the bay is nowhere near what it was in the 1990s, said Lawrence Niles, an independent wildlife biologist who once headed New Jersey’s state endangered species program. The bay is where the crabs breed and the red knots feed. One of the most important ecosystems for horseshoe crabs is the Delaware Bay, an estuary of the Delaware River between Delaware and New Jersey. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the species as being “vulnerable” based on a 2016 assessment. The Atlantic horseshoe crab, the species harvested on the East Coast, ranges from the Gulf of Maine to Florida. “The critical role of horseshoe crab in the biopharmaceutical supply chain and coastal ecosystem makes their conservation imperative,” he said. However, for now the wild harvest of horseshoe crabs remains critically important to drug safety, Blair said. Blair was a member of a working group that crafted the updated guidelines alongside other industry members, conservationists, fishery managers, fishermen and others.īlair said the industry is working toward a synthetic alternative - an outcome conservationists have been pushing for years. That’s exactly what the new guidelines will do, said Nora Blair, quality operations manager with Charles River Laboratories, one of the companies that manufactures LAL from horseshoe crab blood. “The goal is to give the crabs that are bled a better chance of surviving and contributing to the ecosystem after they are released,” she said. Those include minimizing exposure to sunlight and keeping crabs cool and moist, Starks said. Still, the fisheries commission in May approved new best management practices for the biomedical industry’s harvesting and handling of the crabs. The bait fishery for horseshoe crabs, which are used as bait for eels and sea snails, killed more than six times that, she said. In 2021, that meant about 112,000 crabs died, said Caitlin Starks, a senior fishery management plan coordinator with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission. Regulators estimate about 15% of the crabs die in the bleeding process. The blood is often described by activist groups as worth $15,000 a quart (liter), though some members of the industry say that figure is impossible to verify. There are only five federally licensed manufacturers on the East Coast that process horseshoe crab blood. It takes dozens of the crabs to produce enough blood to fill a single glass tube with its blood, which contains immune cells sensitive to bacteria. The crabs are collected by fishermen by hand or via trawlers for use by biomedical companies, then their blood is separated and proteins within their white blood cells are processed. The horseshoe crabs are valuable because their blood can be manufactured into limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL, that is used to detect pathogens in indispensable medicines such as injectable antibiotics. “There’s very clear linkage between horseshoe crabs and the survival of the red knot in the coming decades.” “Making sure there is enough to fuel these birds on this massive, insanely long flight is just critical,” Kraft said.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |