Why do we harvest horseshoe crab blood? - Elizabeth Cox
Check out our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/teded View full lesson: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/why-do-we-harvest-horseshoe-crab-blood-elizabeth-cox During the warmer months, especially...
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During the warmer months, especially at night during the full moon, horseshoe crabs emerge from the sea to spawn. Waiting for them are teams of lab workers who capture the horseshoe crabs by the hundreds of thousands, take them to labs, harvest their cerulean blood, then return them to the sea. Oddly enough, we capture horseshoe crabs on the beach because that's the only place we know we can find them. A female horseshoe crab lays as many as 20 batches of up to 4,000 eggs on her annual visit to the beach. When the eggs hatch, the juvenile horseshoe crabs often stay near shore, periodically shedding their shells as they grow. Once they leave these shallow waters, they don't return until they reach sexual maturity ten years later. Despite o...
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During the warmer months, especially at night during the full moon, horseshoe crabs emerge from the sea to spawn. Waiting for them are teams of lab workers who capture the horseshoe crabs by the hundreds of thousands, take them to labs, harvest their cerulean blood, then return them to the sea. Oddly enough, we capture horseshoe crabs on the beach because that's the only place we know we can find them. A female horseshoe crab lays as many as 20 batches of up to 4,000 eggs on her annual visit to the beach. When the eggs hatch, the juvenile horseshoe crabs often stay near shore, periodically shedding their shells as they grow. Once they leave these shallow waters, they don't return until they reach sexual maturity ten years later. Despite o...
