4 years of fieldwork with horseshoe crabs and the community of humans they attract gives me the foundation for engagement in understanding the ways humans and crabs interact, intraact, and intersect. Through interviews with an international array of scientists, conservationists, pharmaceutical executives, fishermen, students, and beachcombers, I examine the ways humans come to use and know crabs. Also balancing intraspecies mindfulness with scientific data collection, I have spent hours and hours on beaches (primarily in New York City) engaging with crabs, conducting egg density surveys, coring the beach, censusing crab populations, evaluating shell quality, measuring carapace size, surveying shells for numbers and types of fouling organisms, counting juveniles, and measuring sediments. I have attended international meetings of crab-monitoring and endangered species designation workshops. The traditional methods of qualitative interviews and ethnographic fieldwork are combined with physical and emotional engagement with thousands of horseshoe crabs.
Layout of the Book
Each chapter of this book takes up a different theoretical framing and geographical location of horseshoe crabs.
As many scientists attest, we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction.34 In order for the rate of extinction to be deemed a significant ecological crisis, scientists use the fossil record to calculate the changes in biodiversity on the planet caused by meteorological and geological events such as asteroids hitting the Earth and volcanic eruptions. In chapter 2, “Endangered,” I interpret the evaluation of the species health of the horseshoe crab while simultaneously interrogating the debates of framing our current time period as the Anthropocene, the epoch that attributes massive climate change and species decline to human activities, not just to nonhuman events.
Every 4 years the International Workshop on the Science and Conservation of the Horseshoe Crab is held for scientists and educators to exchange information about the species. In 2015, I participated in this conference in Sasebo, Japan, the largest to date, with over 130 presenters from Japan, the United States, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Malaysia, Singapore, India, the Philippines, Mexico, Denmark, and Poland. One of the main reasons for these meetings, in addition to the scientific exchange of data, is to establish protocols for classifying horseshoe crabs on the scales of extinction. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)—a team of concerned humans, including marine biologists, microbiologists, ecologists, ecotoxicologists, paleontologists, and conservationists—is the oldest global conservation organization. A primary objective of its work is to support biodiversity and create species specialist groups for vulnerable organisms.
The IUCN Horseshoe Crab Specialist Group formed to collect data to evaluate the conservation status of the four living species of horseshoe crabs for placement on the IUCN Red List. The Red List is IUCN’s comprehensive evaluation of global plant, fungi, and animal species and their relative threat of extinction. The procedure for assessing the risk of species extinction involves monitoring and compiling empirical data. The Red List categories are Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered, Endangered, Vulnerable, Near Threatened, Least Concern, Data Deficient, and Not Evaluated. Currently, the North American horseshoe crab Limulus polyphemus is listed as Vulnerable. The three Asian horseshoe crab species are listed as Data Deficient, which means that they have not been critically reviewed. Red Listing an organism doesn’t guarantee protection, but the Red List status informs policy makers of the situation and may add greater power to conservation efforts.
“Endangered” takes up the meta-analysis of humans measuring species decline. How is it that particular species becomes a concern for humans? It has become somewhat of a given that humans care about charismatic megafauna, those large mammals of popular appeal—think of cuddly stuffed animals cementing our lifelong relationship with animals we’ll never meet in the wild. But how do ugly, weird, spiny, or spiky animals come to matter? How do we make them count? The literary critic Ursula Heise cogently argues that when humans “discover” endangerment, it is first and foremost through a process of human storytelling. These stories frame our perception of what animals come to matter and why and guide scientific techniques and measurements.35 My book is an attempt to understand the story of how horseshoe crabs have come to be understood and designated as Vulnerable.
The sexual reproduction of horseshoe crabs is the basis of chapter 3, “Amplexed.” Horseshoe crabs do not successfully breed in captivity. Therefore researchers attempt to collect as much data on crabs in the wild and establish laboratory-based experiments in order to examine the their reproductive cycle. Horseshoe crab reproduction, also called spawning, is an event that excites humans—field biologists, other professionals, and laypeople. In fact, in the Northeast United States in May and June, conservation groups and individuals plan spawning field trips to visit nesting habitat and watch the crabs come to shore in amplexed pairs. When pairs of male and female horseshoe crabs reproduce, they do so by amplexing, or clasping in a “copulatory embrace.” This chapter examines the ways humans study, present, and represent these reproductive events.
I use my own participation in, and analysis of, mate choice experiments, horseshoe crab spawning field biology data collection, and juvenile counts as data in this chapter. I analyze interviews with horseshoe crab reproduction scientists to understand how they construct normative reproductive practices despite outlier data.
Turning to blood, chapter 4, “Bled,” explores the dangerous world of endotoxins, molecules that form on the external membrane of Gram-negative bacteria like E. coli, Salmonella, Shigella, and many others. Endotoxins are pyrogens, fever-causing agents that are heat stable (these toxins aren’t destroyed when heated). In the right dose, endotoxins are lethal to humans and livestock and companion animals, and they are ubiquitous. Horseshoe crab blood keeps us safe from these endotoxins, but at a cost. This chapter examines the growing tensions between the field biologists and the conservationists and the pharmaceutical companies and medical professionals in how horseshoe crab blood is harvested and used. It explores the issues surrounding the amoebocyte lysate tests that are used to detect the presence of endotoxins on both local and global scales. North American horseshoe crab blood is used for the Limulus amoebocyte lysate (LAL) test, and the blood of Asian horseshoe crab species is used for the Tachypleus amoebocyte lysate (TAL) test. Testing the safety of biomedical devices that go inside the human body requires the LAL test. Even though there is a synthetic alternative, it is bureaucratically untenable. Despite the fact that bloodletting for the LAL test causes stress to individual crabs and the species as a whole, human discourse narrates it as harmless and safe.
Humans create a safer world and generate profit from horseshoe crab blood. Beginning with an analysis of the discursive and material scaffolding to affirm crab bleeding as a donation, I explain the stakes in how humans characterize the extraction of blood from another species even when our own intraspecies donation is not as simple as we might believe. Next I explain the biomedical significance of the product generated from horseshoe crab blood, Limulus amoebocyte lysate, and how humans have attempted to protect themselves from a world teeming with invisible bacteria through the biopharmaceutical manipulation of horseshoe crab blood. I consider the geopolitical terrain of biopharmaceutical marketing, human population dynamics, and global horseshoe crab endangerment and describe how the crabs (and their valuable blood) are potentially becoming a contested resource between nations and continents. I end with a discussion of how, despite the synthetic alternative to LAL being available, there is no pragmatic, political, or economic will to switch to this product, thus ensuring the continued bleeding of horseshoe crabs. Ultimately, this chapter traces how human and nonhuman matters bleed into one another, whereby nonhuman animals fortify our bodies in anxious times of disease transmission and our treatment of nonhuman animals inflame, fortify, nuance, or trouble the intrahuman matters of worthiness, global stratification, and commerce. The pharmaceutical industry represents an intensification of the human-crab relationship. It is in a sense a speedup of globalization and biomedicalization in which tensions between conservationists and biotech
