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The horseshoe crabs are valuable because their blood can be manufactured into limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL, that is used to detect pathogens in indispensable medicines such as injectable antibiotics.

“I certainly don’t believe in killing animals unnecessarily. And you can argue, if you want to, against animal research, until it impacts your own health, of course. But the argument that the lysate industry is depopulating the crab population is just not correct.”

Last summer, as coronavirus infection rates continued to rise, a group of researchers from Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer and Roche-Genentechpublished a research report that compared the two products — limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL, which is made from horseshoe crab blood, and the synthetic product, called recombinant Factor C assay, or rFC.

Scientists harnessed nature’s ingenuity, using crab blood to make so-called amebocyte lysate endotoxin tests which, by the 1970s, began displacing tests on rabbits that were injected with medicine then monitored for fever.

The copper-based blood of the horseshoe crab contains the most sensitive indicator of bacteria ever discovered, limulus amoebocyte lysate.