the.com/horseshoe crab
a 450-million-year-old tank with blue blood that medicine still can't live without
means A large, dome-shelled marine arthropod with a spiked tail, more closely related to spiders and scorpions than to true crabs, whose copper-based blue blood is harvested to test medicines and vaccines for bacterial contamination.
from The English name simply describes the shape: the broad, rounded front shell looks like a horse's hoof or a horseshoe. The creature isn't a crab at all — it belongs to its own ancient lineage of chelicerates, kin to arachnids. Its genus name, Limulus, comes from Latin meaning roughly 'slanting' or 'askew,' a nod to its odd, lopsided-looking form. The 'blue blood' comes from hemocyanin, a copper-based oxygen carrier that turns blue when oxygenated, unlike our iron-based, red hemoglobin.
- blue blood
- copper-based hemocyanin, harvested to test vaccines for contamination
- living fossil
- older than dinosaurs, trees, and Saturn's rings
- not a crab
- closer kin to spiders and scorpions
- ten eyes
- sees ultraviolet and senses light across its body
- flip survivor
- uses its tail to right itself, not to sting
limulus polyphemus — atlantic horseshoe crab, harvested for blue blood used in medical device testing since the 1970s
tachypleus tridentatus — asian horseshoe crab species, critically endangered, found in china and southeast asia
delaware bay spawning — 2+ million horseshoe crabs migrate to delaware bay each may to breed, monitored since 1990s