Conservationists urge companies to drop testing method that uses crab blood
By Jon Hurdle, Contributing Writer, NJ Spotlight News
Officials from five major pharmaceutical companies met at a Delaware Bayshore house to hear how they can help save the horseshoe crab and to watch the annual spectacle of spawning horseshoe crabs and migrating shorebirds along a remote part of the New Jersey coastline.
The gathering on Tuesday, at Reeds Beach, Cape May County, was the first time that pharmaceutical industry officials trekked to the rural bayshore to discuss the arguments for dropping a testing method that uses the blood of horseshoe crabs, and to walk the beaches where the crabs spawn and thousands of birds feast on their eggs for a couple of weeks each spring.
Advocates for the protection of both horseshoe crabs and red knots hope that the combination of chemistry and conservation will persuade the officials to recommend the companies switch from the crab-based LAL reagent most use now to a synthetic substance called rFC when testing for endotoxins in medical products.
An industry-wide switch away from the crab-based reagent would end a significant source of demand for horseshoe crabs. That would give the ancient creatures a better chance of fully recovering from a drastic over-harvest in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when they were taken from bay beaches in huge numbers by the commercial fishing industry, which uses them for bait. The over-harvesting caused the population of red knot, a federally threatened shorebird that depends on the crab eggs, to crash, raising fears the bird would go extinct unless its favorite food source.
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