And then humans came along to mess with em
this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Stupid life-saving copper based blood...
I find it hard to understand, what special thing the blood has, that is not synthetically manufacturable. With most foodstuff companies trying to synthetically manufacture as much of the food as they can, what makes this "Near Threatened" animal, so important to harvest?
I googled it for you, there is LAL which is a blood clotting agent (that exists only in the blood of horseshoe crabs) that reacts with the bacterial capsule which makes it important for vaccine safety tests. Alternatives do exist but ya know, money is more important to corporations than some animal's life.
Alternatives do exist but ya know, money is more important
What are the alternatives, and how can we reduce their costs to match that of horseshoe crab blood?
I have done some more googling (I can't stress this enough, I am just googling)
The top alternatives are rFC (genetically modified cells produce the required enzyme) and MAT (human monocytes do the detection) They're more costly, picking ready fruit is easier than growing an orchard.
Also I should mention how new the alternatives are, they're just (2018 is just now for me lol) getting their approvals and regulations so given time LAL will be replaced.
given time LAL will be replaced
That sounds encouraging!
Subsidies
So they'll use alternatives once the crabs go extinct.
Well... 😶
It's like a more realistic representation of what Neo would see when he wakes from the Matrix
Absence of paleontological evidence of change in appearance does not mean evolutionary stagnation
Doesn't it? It doesn't seem obvious either way. Are you an actual paleontologist, or just guessing?
Molecular biologist.
It's mostly a matter of what we don't know. Paleontological evidence certainly shows that horseshoe crabs didn't change much in their appearance. However, we just don't know to what extent other aspects of their biology are as conserved. Therefore, it is just unscientific to say that horseshoe crabs are 'living fossils' or that they didn't evolve for millions of years. They may have, they may not have
I came to mention the same. Static phenotype ≠ static genotype.
If anyone else is struggling, this reasonably basic article helped me https://sciencenotes.org/genotype-vs-phenotype-definitions-and-examples/
Much obliged ! I was just thinking these strings of letters kinda looked like words
Honestly, I'm pretty sure they post any old brain rot here and then have an AI fabricate supporting articles online just to mess with us...
Sorry! We're both biologists, we get nerdy.
No I love it - that's why we're here.
I learned something today and hope to gently explain it to my degenerating/conservative father (but let's not get into that kettle of fustercluck!)
Makes me wonder, would epigenetic speciation be possible?
I would have to assume there's some ecological pressure they're either experiencing or shielded from. If they're under environmental pressure, they are either exceptionally developed to endure environmental changes or they're adapting to the environment in ways that don't reflect in their physiology. If they've just found a niche biome where the ecological conditions are fairly static, and they're well suited to the environment, what changes would you see other than some generic genetic drift?
It makes sense. I just wasn't sure how likely it would be for species to evolve in significant ways over a long time without obvious changes to the shape of their fossils. Difficult to spot evolution happens a lot, apparently:
Cryptic, or sibling, species are discrete species that are difficult, or sometimes impossible, to distinguish morphologically and thus have been incorrectly classified as a single taxon. Cryptic species are found from the poles to the Equator and in all major terrestrial and aquatic taxonomic groups [2, 3]. For example, a recent meta-analysis yielded 2,207 articles reporting cryptic species in all metazoan phyla and classes, including 996 new species in insects, 267 in mammals, 151 in fishes and 94 in birds [2].
Yeah exactly. I’m not a biologist but I am aware that horseshoe crabs are harvested for their blood and its unique properties. How much evolution (in the last 450MY) have they undergone in terms of their immune system and other microbiological processes? We may never know but I think it’s quite a stretch to assume “none!”
Yet some of them still managed to evolve into spiders...
They were bored one afternoon
Nice doggie!
Science abhors a vacuum but it fucking loves a crab
Nature abhors a vaccuum
Fascinating creatures. TIL they are more closely related to arachnids than crabs.
How close are they to horseshoes?
Practically identical.
How about hand grenades?
Hihi...asking the most important questions.
One of the best things I got to do as a kid was go down to horseshoe crab time at the shore at pet them and hear a science human talk about their fancy blood. The fancy blood of the horseshoe crabs, not the science human's blood.
Heckin sea roomba
Lazy bastards
all extant species (except hu-men) be like: evolve? whats that. just livin out here.
