Crab Specialist Group formed to collect data to evaluate the conservation status of the four living species of horseshoe crabs for placement on the IUCN Red List. The Red List is IUCN’s comprehensive evaluation of global plant, fungi, and animal species and their relative threat of extinction. The procedure for assessing the risk of species extinction involves monitoring and compiling empirical data. The Red List categories are Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, Near Threatened, Least Concern, Data Deficient, and Not Evaluated. Currently, the North American horseshoe crab Limulus polyphemus is listed as Vulnerable. The three Asian horseshoe crab species are listed as Data Deficient, which means that they have not been critically reviewed. Red Listing an organism doesn’t guarantee protection, but the Red List status informs policy makers of the situation and may add greater power to conservation efforts.
“Endangered” takes up the meta-analysis of humans measuring species decline. How is it that particular species becomes a concern for humans? It has become somewhat of a given that humans care about charismatic megafauna, those large mammals of popular appeal—think of cuddly stuffed animals cementing our lifelong relationship with animals we’ll never meet in the wild. But how do ugly, weird, spiny, or spiky animals come to matter? How do we make them count? The literary critic Ursula Heise cogently argues that when humans “discover” endangerment, it is first and foremost through a process of human storytelling. These stories frame our perception of what animals come to matter and why and guide scientific techniques and measurements.35 My book is an attempt to understand the story of how horseshoe crabs have come to be understood and designated as Vulnerable.
The sexual reproduction of horseshoe crabs is the basis of chapter 3, “Amplexed.” Horseshoe crabs do not successfully breed in captivity. Therefore researchers attempt to collect as much data on crabs in the wild and establish laboratory-based experiments in order to examine the their reproductive cycle. Horseshoe crab reproduction, also called spawning, is an event that excites humans—field biologists, other professionals, and laypeople. In fact, in the Northeast United States in May and June, conservation groups and individuals plan spawning field trips to visit nesting habitat and watch the crabs come to shore in amplexed pairs. When pairs of male and female horseshoe crabs reproduce, they do so by amplexing, or clasping in a “copulatory embrace.” This chapter examines the ways humans study, present, and represent these reproductive events.
I use my own participation in, and analysis of, mate choice experiments, horseshoe crab spawning field biology data collection, and juvenile counts as data in this chapter. I analyze interviews with horseshoe crab reproduction scientists to understand how they construct normative reproductive practices despite outlier data.
Turning to blood, chapter 4, “Bled,” explores the dangerous world of endotoxins, molecules that form on the external membrane of Gram-negative bacteria like E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella, and many others. Endotoxins are pyrogens, fever-causing agents that are heat stable (these toxins aren’t destroyed when heated). In the right dose, endotoxins are lethal to humans and livestock and companion animals, and they are ubiquitous. Horseshoe crab blood keeps us safe from these endotoxins, but at a cost. This chapter examines the growing tensions between the field biologists and the conservationists and the pharmaceutical companies and medical professionals in how horseshoe crab blood is harvested and used. It explores the issues surrounding the amoebocyte lysate tests that are used to detect the presence of endotoxins on both local and global scales. North American horseshoe crab blood is used for the Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL) test, and the blood of Asian horseshoe crab species is used for the Tachypleus amoebocyte lysate (TAL) test. Testing the safety of biomedical devices that go inside the human body requires the LAL test. Even though there is a synthetic alternative, it is bureaucratically untenable. Despite the fact that bloodletting for the LAL test causes stress to individual crabs and the species as a whole, human discourse narrates it as harmless and safe.
Humans create a safer world and generate profit from horseshoe crab blood. Beginning with an analysis of the discursive and material scaffolding to affirm crab bleeding as a donation, I explain the stakes in how humans characterize the extraction of blood from another species even when our own intraspecies donation is not as simple as we might believe. Next I explain the biomedical significance of the product generated from horseshoe crab blood, Limulus amoebocyte lysate, and how humans have attempted to protect themselves from a world teeming with invisible bacteria through the biopharmaceutical manipulation of horseshoe crab blood. I consider the geopolitical terrain of biopharmaceutical marketing, human population dynamics, and global horseshoe crab endangerment and describe how the crabs (and their valuable blood) are potentially becoming a contested resource between nations and continents. I end with a discussion of how, despite the synthetic alternative to LAL being available, there is no pragmatic, political, or economic will to switch to this product, thus ensuring the continued bleeding of horseshoe crabs. Ultimately, this chapter traces how human and nonhuman matters bleed into one another, whereby nonhuman animals fortify our bodies in anxious times of disease transmission and our treatment of nonhuman animals inflame, fortify, nuance, or trouble the intrahuman matters of worthiness, global stratification, and commerce. The pharmaceutical industry represents an intensification of the human-crab relationship. It is in a sense a speedup of globalization and biomedicalization in which tensions between conservationists and biotech companies weave an interesting story.
Finally, chapter 5, “Enmeshed,” considers habitat and space as meaningful, albeit in different ways, to horseshoe crabs and humans. Using Timothy Morton’s notion of hyperobjects—global warming, in this instance—as a backdrop in this chapter,36 I explain how site fidelity and reclamation projects increase the vulnerabilities of both species. As access to shoreline and coastal habitats are under threat, both crabs and humans must adapt to changing environmental stressors.
Site fidelity refers to horseshoe crabs remaining faithful to, and to returning to, their specific spawning ground year after year to breed. Their site fidelity both increases their vulnerability to harvesting and makes them an excellent species for field biologists to study—you know where to find them. Musing on the term and behavior of site fidelity, I describe the ecological land/seascapes of horseshoe and human habitats in decline and how horseshoe crabs become a sentinel species for human interpretation of ecological health.
This chapter also examines the practice of reclamation, which refers to human engineering to change lakes, rivers, oceanfront, or marshes into usable land. Habitat destruction through reclamation projects such as beach armament and embankment destroy geomorphical continuity. For example, in Japan more than half of Japanese beaches are covered by artificial structures to address sea-level rise, to fortify shorelines for tsunami protection, or to extend the coastline outward and backfill to create industrial, agricultural, or residential land. Globally by 2025, it is predicted that 75% of all human populations will live at the coastline. This massive concentration of population at the coast as sea levels rise creates conditions for hot, sour, and breathless bodies of water. Algal blooms will continue to suffocate seas, with hypoxia and acidification of the oceans, combined with runoff of heavy metals and pesticides into the sea, creating conditions that are toxic to horseshoe crabs. According to Mattei, it isn’t egg predation that is killing urban horseshoe crab eggs—it is contamination: Eggs are poisoned by lead and other pollutants. Juvenile crabs also suffer from lack of food sources owing to contamination. Horseshoe crabs’ long maturation process means that a single “missed” generation could have massive population effects. Creating a “living shoreline,” or urban estuaries, is one possible solution that I discuss in this chapter.
In the conclusion, “From the Sea,” I speculate on the future of the horseshoe crab. I also consider its remarkable ability to survive as a species for millions of years, and I make a case for its continued persistence. Furthermore, I also suggest that the sentinel data that we are generating from studies of horseshoe crabs and habitat destruction might actually indicate that it is humans who have more to fear from our engineering of the shorelines than horseshoe crabs. I end with a reminder of the themes that were explored throughout this book.
Over my lifetime, and more