Real talk I’m fine with hurting crabs for our own means. Straight up.
Whoa! That’s some Human Supremacist talk there.
Hell yeah. Whole point is to get the species off the rock, then out of the meat suit
Not necessarily in that order
Pretty sure I played a horror game with that concept once… SOMA?
I personally would like to become a conscious cloud of gas.
Or mammal supremacist. Or vertebrate supremacist. There are options
On god, no cap frfr str8 bussin.
Real talk I’m fine with hurting other living beings that aren’t me for my own means. Straight up.
That’s literally life. Unless you’re a plant, you’re killing things to eat.
And if you’re a plant, either you’re eating things that were already killed and/or outright killing other plants for their blood or to take their sunlight. And that’s if you don’t mention carnivorous plants which, ik eat animals
Kinda? I think it’s more accurate to say that the nutrients they need from the soil are from decomposed dead things. Competition for sunlight is a real thing, but I’m not sure if that counts. I suppose it does, since it’s all about survival. Same would go for species that have fights with themselves.
I am.
I know it sucks, but they play an invaluable role in modern medicine, I hope that we can find an alternative to using them, but AFAIK there is nothing that works in the same manner yet.
They may have a substitute in the pipeline
discovered that a molecule in LAL called factor C was responsible for its clotting action. Researchers genetically modified the guts of insects—who belong to the same phylum as horseshoe
Oh that is excellent news! I was unaware!
They’re chelicerates though, not crustaceans. But then again, apparently everything evolves into crabs anyway
apparently everything evolves into crabs anyway
And for those who can’t be arsed reading. Here’s a great video Crabs
*CRAB PEOPLE. CRAB PEOPLE. *
everything evolves into crabs anyway
Does that mean I can become a crab too?
Get to walking sideways and eating mud, friend!
They all serve a purpose in their own way, this one specifically does a great job!
Same here
I’m fine with hurting all wildlife.
Edit: if you realized this was satire, then congrats! If you didn’t, then congrats!
I’m fine with hurting all life.
I am.
Missed an opportunity for “I’m hurting all life.”
I’m fine with missing all opportunities
If horseshoe crabs were to become less economically important, is that a good thing for horseshoe crabs? They ain’t exactly Pandas, so will little Sally and Bobby care if horseshoe crabs become endangered? They’re already in a precarious situation…
Horseshoe crabs have been existing for almost half a billion years, I would genuinely be sad if we endanger them to critical levels
Climate Change is warming the waters they spawn their eggs in. They’re becoming endangered from that. Not because of a few we harvest blood from.
I didn’t say that harvesting blood is the one thing endangering them, did I. Just that it would be a shame to see them go
That’s the topic of this thread and even if you didn’t say blood harvesting was endangering them, most people are already going to be thinking that’s what you’re implying.
That’s a fair assumption to make, true.
Idk, I’m just someone who says things exactly the way I think 'em. I don’t intend for a deeper meaning to be interpreted, but people are going to do that, because that’s just how people are. So again, fair.r u special?
Wow, you seem like a lovely person.
But the blood harvesting helps. Huh. Never thought I’d use the word “blood harvest” today, or ever really.
I think living to have your fluids harvested in factory farms is a worse outcome than going extinct.
Personally speaking, the fluid in question and method of harvest would determine how much I’d rather be dead.
if things got to brain in a jar levels and I am complacently accepting of the fake reality, then I might just live a long life
You can not prove your brain isn’t already in a jar being fed signals to simulate reality.
If you are any part of nature and also economically important, you get barbarically exploited until you go extinct. If you are not, you will be bulldozed to make room for the former. Capitalism is the best system of morality humans have ever, and will ever, come up with, and I truly cherish the utopia it has brought upon civilization.
Capitalism isn’t a system of morality. Or at least it isn’t supposed to be.
The fact that people think more money = moral is one of the largest problems in the world right now.
I’m pretty sure it was sarcastic.
all hail the paper which ruins literally every single fucking thing. the paper has spoken.
I chose to express it like that by design. My contention is that capitalism is, in fact, or at the very least de facto, a system of morality. It promotes wealth as an indicator of higher moral stature. It has superseded rule of democracy, as wealth has been assigned itself as a metric by which the efficacy of individual civil participation is measured and the path of society determined.
In other words, money equals power, and possessing money/power is indicative of a higher moral. Echoes of medieval times…
Cows and chickens are doing pretty well in terms of raw numbers.
Trivia of the day, horseshoe crab blood is blue because it is copper based instead of iron based like our blood
They’re actually being fed the blue milk from Star Wars 8
That was green milk. Blue milk is from Episode IV.
ah yes, The Final Generation
It’s a simple, nearly instantaneous test that goes by the name of the LAL, or Limulus amebocyte lysate, test (after the species name of the crab, Limulus polyphemus). The LAL test replaced the rather horrifying prospect of possibly contaminated substances being tested on “large colonies of rabbits.” Pharma companies didn’t like the rabbit process, either, because it was slow and expensive.
From https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-blood-harvest/284078/ (emphasis mine).
Once it is fast and cheap, expect to see these alien fluid harvesting plants everywhere.
This is the kind of shit you see right at the start of alien invasion type sci fi flicks.
Or in China on a Wednesday.
(I am being a little sarcastic, but traditional Chinese medicine can have some really shitty practices.)
Just like tmnt
The crabs are released afterwards, it doesn’t kill them. Not saying it’s a perfectly ethical situation, but at least it’s not kill em en masse.
For those who don’t know, the blue liquid is their blood
Stop all animal testing and torture
This isn’t specifically animal testing, rather it is a process to get life saving medicine. They are working hard to synthesize it luckily. This has been the subject of a few major podcasts but I can’t remember which ones.
Radiolab has an awesome episode https://radiolab.org/podcast/baby-blue-blood-drive
First off, this isn’t testing. We know exactly what we need Horseshoe Crab blood for, and it’s incredibly important.
Second, it’s probably not torture. The worst-case-scenario level of discomfort from bleeding them is fairly low, like a human giving blood. And that (incorrectly) presupposes them having as advanced pain-sensing as humans. The actual death rate is the bigger issue, but we are talking about saving lives and the medical community is trying really hard to change the status quo on this. Covered below.
Third, what you’re seeing in that picture saves thousands of lives per year. How much human suffering, how many human deaths, are you willing to accept to achieve those goals? What if one of those humans that has to suffer or die was your kid? There’s no plant-based alternative to this process at this time.
Let me clarify this. Using horseshoe crabs for this purpose is VERY EXPENSIVE. It’s only done because we don’t have an alternative yet, and the process is necessary for modern medicine. There is plenty of research going into either making this process less expensive (which probably involves a lower death rate for crabs) or finding an entirely different process to achieve the same goals. But none has been found (well, except that they used to use rabbits for this. I don’t know the details)
I can understand the desire to spare… um…shellfish some…uh… pain I guess. But NOT at the expense of human life and suffering. That’s just silly.
they don’t die tho
Just tortured their entire lives
Wondering when the land people will come to suck their blood again
It’s catch and release, not life long milking. Granted, the survival rate isn’t as high as I’d like (70-90% apparently), but I do also appreciate having safe injectable medicines. All things considered, with a species bias, I’d prefer dozens of humans live at the expense of a… Not crab. Unfortunate though it may be. I can’t also help but notice you’ve anthropomorphised them a bit. I’m certain these creatures respond to negative stimulus, but attributing fear and life long trauma seems to be giving their intelligence a bit of an unfounded boost.
🤓
they catch, “milk” and release them, most of them recover from it. (weaker ones tend to die tho, with survival rate of around 80%)
Honestly, of all the messed up shit we do with animals draining blood from a bunch of crabs for medical purposes seems like one of the less egregious ones.
A lot of them do end up dying from this, yes.
around 20% which is acceptable… i think?
