The Last Days of the Blue-Blood Harvest

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/blood-in-the-water/559229/?single_page=true

by GW150914 • 8 years ago

103 33 8 years ago

theatlantic.com

fallingfrog• 8 years ago

Was expecting an article about the French Revolution. Disappoint.

himom• 8 years ago

No crowdshare guillotine apps yet, but I hear Khosla Ventures and KPCB want to invest to materialize this category.

aoki2• 8 years ago

it's not the point of the article, but i find it fascinating that this industry has managed to figure out how to capture >400k wild animals per year and return ~90% of them alive to the ocean after harvesting their blood with a giant needle.

there must be an interesting story here about how they figured out that they needed to do this with a sustainable take rate (unlike most commercial fishing industries).

eksu• 8 years ago

commercial fishing industries have a vested interest in achieving the maximum sustainable yield.

furthermore, legislation like quota systems are generally supported because it gives companies a golden ticket to harvest while denying newcomers from entering the space.

aoki2• 8 years ago

yet in practice overfishing occurs in species after species; individual interests do not always align with the macro interests.

that's why i think there's an interesting story lurking here. there were probably a small number of technocratic players involved (maybe even one) who were able to specify how the chain should work.

OrganicMSG• 8 years ago

The cod wars between the UK and Iceland would suggest that fisheries policy is often not exactly the most calmly rational of human endeavours.

toomanybeersies• 8 years ago

Unfortunately overfishing is super common. Tragedy of the commons and all that.

Quota systems and overfishing aren't mutually exclusive either. There's plenty of fisheries quotas that are still higher than a sustainable quota should be.

chrisweekly2• 8 years ago

That sounds logical, but in my experience as a coastal New Englander, boat owner and former Seafood.com employee, (albeit 20 years ago), commercial fishing _communities_ (possibly critically distinct from the "industries" you noted) skew heavily towards anti-fisheries management. Think "NMFS destroys families" bumper stickers.

stevenwoo• 8 years ago

There was an older article in the Atlantic that showed we aren't actually sure if the horseshoe crabs are unharmed by being taken out of the water and draining a lot of their blood. The declining numbers says we might be harming them or it might be some other factor. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-b...

jessaustin• 8 years ago

I'm similarly suspicious of "catch & release" fishing...

jpatokal• 8 years ago

Horseshoe crabs are rather extraordinary creatures. They're essentially unchanged for 450 million years, and look like it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab

The roe is edible too, but has to be prepared very carefully as it can contain the same poison (tetratodoxin) as blowfish/fugu:

https://praneesthaikitchen.com/2013/01/28/horseshoe-crab-egg...

throwaway010718• 8 years ago

"Horseshoe-crab blood is exquisitely sensitive to toxins from bacteria. It is used to test for contamination during the manufacture of anything that might go inside the human body"

This seems like an impossibly random discovery. Did scientists test the blood of various animals until they finally found an optimum with horseshoe crabs ?

koolba• 8 years ago

I’m no medical boffin but their blood being blue seems like it’s interesting enough to warrant investigation into things like this.

kemiller• 8 years ago

Blue blood is moderately common among large invertebrates. It’s due to copper being the oxygen binding element.

GuiA• 8 years ago

Please read the article entirely before rushing to comment...

”Bang, a pathologist, was interested in the creature’s primitive immune system. He settled on a protocol of injecting bacteria from seawater directly into horseshoe crabs, which cause their blood to clump into “stringy masses.”

Bang suspected this clotting had a purpose. It immobilized the bacteria, sealing off the rest of the horseshoe crab’s body from an invading pathogen. Intriguingly, their blood turned to gel even if he boiled the bacteria injection for five or 10 minutes first. This should have killed the bacteria and sterilized the injected solution. Bang realized the blood was sensitive not just to live bacteria but to bacterial toxins that persist even after sterilization.”

ryanwaggoner2• 8 years ago

Or you can just post your comment without reading the long article and some gloomy scold will do the hard work for you :)

This reminds me of how the best way to get the correct answer to a question on a technical forum isn't to ask, but to post the wrong answer. Someone will be along shortly to correct you.

https://xkcd.com/386/

The Last Days of the Blue-Blood Harvest

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