Why Is This Living Fossil's Blood So Expensive?

What the film says

1. LAL made from horseshoe crab blood has been reported to cost about $60,000 a gallon.

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2. Horseshoe crabs are not crustaceans; they are more closely related to arachnids such as spiders and scorpions.

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3. Blood is drawn from the pericardium and the crabs are then returned to the water.

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4. Delaware Bay is the main spawning area and the largest shorebird staging area on the Atlantic Flyway.

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5. A female may spawn over several nights to lay 100,000 or more eggs.

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6. Rufa red knots fly more than 9,300 miles each spring from as far as Tierra del Fuego to the Canadian Arctic.

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7. In Delaware Bay red knots feed almost exclusively on horseshoe crab eggs.

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8. Overharvest of horseshoe crabs in the 1990s was the key factor in red knot declines; numbers fell about 75% in some key areas since the 1980s.

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9. Jeak Ling Ding's lab at the National University of Singapore cloned horseshoe crab factor C in 1995 and built recombinant factor C proteins by 2000.

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