Prehistoric crabs help test vaccine safety

Horseshoe crabs are strange looking sea creatures. They existed before the dinosaurs. They've swum in our oceans for 450 million years. Horseshoe crabs aren't from the crab family. They're related to spiders and scorpions.

Nivette Pérez-Pérez: "Horseshoe crabs, in, in difference of their common name, they're not crabs. They're actually arthropods that are related to spiders and scorpions. This is a female, and one of the ways to see that is this first pair of legs. They're actually pinchers."

Since the 1970s, horseshoe crabs have helped medicine. Their blood has a special chemical in it. The chemical's used to test for harmful bacteria. Bacteria on medical equipment is extremely dangerous. So, this chemical's essential for safe operations and vaccines. It's now used a lot more, says Glenn Gauvry.

Glenn Gauvry: "One of the things that has always been tested with this test is vaccines. So we've got vaccines around the world for all kinds of things, but we now have a whole new wave of vaccines being produced and developed for the battle against Covid. And they're being tested on, on the same test made from the horseshoe crab blood."

Every year, about 500,000 horseshoe crabs have their blood taken for science. Around 15 percent of these die in the process, and this isn't the only danger for these animals. So it's very important to find a different chemical to replace horseshoe crab blood. A Swiss biotech company's developing an alternative, but it's still in the development stage.

In the US, volunteers are watching and counting the horseshoe crabs in their natural habitat. Laurel Sullivan thinks this is very special.

Laurel Sullivan: "We have the largest spawning population in the world in the Delaware Bay. So it's something that people in this area take very seriously and they're really passionate about, because it's something that's really unique to this area."

View Less