And then humans came along to mess with em
Stupid life-saving copper based blood...
I find it hard to understand, what special thing the blood has, that is not synthetically manufacturable. With most foodstuff companies trying to synthetically manufacture as much of the food as they can, what makes this "Near Threatened" animal, so important to harvest?
I googled it for you, there is LAL which is a blood clotting agent (that exists only in the blood of horseshoe crabs) that reacts with the bacterial capsule which makes it important for vaccine safety tests. Alternatives do exist but ya know, money is more important to corporations than some animal's life.
Alternatives do exist but ya know, money is more important
What are the alternatives, and how can we reduce their costs to match that of horseshoe crab blood?
I have done some more googling (I can't stress this enough, I am just googling)
The top alternatives are rFC (genetically modified cells produce the required enzyme) and MAT (human monocytes do the detection) They're more costly, picking ready fruit is easier than growing an orchard.
Also I should mention how new the alternatives are, they're just (2018 is just now for me lol) getting their approvals and regulations so given time LAL will be replaced.
given time LAL will be replaced
That sounds encouraging!
Subsidies
So they'll use alternatives once the crabs go extinct.
Well... 😶
It's like a more realistic representation of what Neo would see when he wakes from the Matrix
Science abhors a vacuum but it fucking loves a crab
Nature abhors a vaccuum
Nice doggie!
Heckin sea roomba
There's no evidence for gods though.
There’s also no evidence that horseshoe crabs have individual names and understand the concept of evolution.
We do have evidence that at least one species give their members individual names, and at least a portion of the members understand the concept of evolution
So i would say we have more evidence for this meme being accurate than any god being real
Fair point. Although one may say this is fine here for comic purposes.
The same argument could be made about the statement "Gods perfect creation".
But I'd argue that the suggestion of a creationist god expands the distance to scientific contexts even more while simple speech bubbles are fine due to less ideological conflict potential.
Admittedly, I am also rather allergic to religions, which is why I am having a difficult time with that part of the meme.
Just for a moment pretend God banged so hard he created the Big Bang which create all life, and laugh at religion joke.
Due to the "being allergic" part this is unfortunately not possible for me. But thanks for trying to provide me with a different perspective.
Me too. It's a science meme community after all.
Yeah, I got it the first time.
Nice!
Yet some of them still managed to evolve into spiders...
They were bored one afternoon
One of the best things I got to do as a kid was go down to horseshoe crab time at the shore at pet them and hear a science human talk about their fancy blood. The fancy blood of the horseshoe crabs, not the science human's blood.
Fascinating creatures. TIL they are more closely related to arachnids than crabs.
How close are they to horseshoes?
Practically identical.
Hihi...asking the most important questions.
How about hand grenades?
Lazy bastards
all extant species (except hu-men) be like: evolve? whats that. just livin out here.
Science Memes
Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
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