• 3 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • Horseshoe crabs are not crusteceans, they are early chelicerates.

    They have an open circulatory system, where the blood (heamolymph) freely spills out of the arteries into surrounding tissues, so a small clot probably wouldn’t cause issues. Think of it like a cyst, sometimes if an infection can’t be removed by the immune system, your body will just enclose it in a capsule, so it can’t spread.


  • Sadly a lot of the companies harvesting them will just kill and sell them for bait anyways.

    Of those that are released, about a third die. Not to say about the decrease in overall fitness, which can lead to them falling prey more easily.

    It’s obviously a traumatic experience for the animal in the best case scenario and that is going to reflect on their ability to survive in the wild.


  • It is not an anticoagulant, quite the opposite actually. The blood (limulus amoebocyte lysate) will coagulate at the slightest hint of gram-negative bacteria and their endotoxins.

    It’s most likely a defense mechanism against bacterial infections.

    It’s widely used in medicine to check for bacterial contamination of injectable pharmaceuticals.