Blue blood from horseshoe crabs is valuable for medicine, but a declining bird needs them for food

abcnews.go.com:

The biomedical industry is adopting new standards to protect a primordial sea animal that is a linchpin of the production of vital medicines

PORTLAND, Maine — A primordial sea animal that lives on the tidal mudflats of the East Coast and serves as a linchpin for the production of vital medicines stands to benefit from new protective standards.

But conservationists who have been trying for years to save a declining bird species — the red knot — that depends on horseshoe crabs fear the protections still don't go far enough.

Drug and medical device makers are dependent on the valuable blue blood of the crabs — helmet-shaped invertebrates that have scuttled in the ocean and tidal pools for more than 400 million years — to test for potentially dangerous impurities. The animals are drained of some of their blood and returned to the environment, but many die from the bleeding.

Recent revisions to guidelines for handling the animals should keep more alive through the process, regulators said. The animals — not really true crabs but rather more closely related to land-dwelling invertebrates such as spiders and scorpions — are declining in some of their East Coast range.

«They were here before the dinosaurs,» said Glenn Gauvry, president of Ecological Research & Development Group, a Delaware-based nonprofit that advocates for horseshoe crab conservation. «And they’re having problems because the new kids on the block, us, haven’t learned to appreciate the elders.»

The harvest of horseshoe crabs, which are also caught for bait in the commercial fishing industry, has emerged as a critical issue for conservationists in recent years because of the creature's role in coastal ecosystems. The crabs' eggs are vitally important food for a