That is not all from one crab and they generally try not to kill the crabs. There is some debate on how many actually die with the companies bleeding them claiming almost none and some other people saying up to 60%, so the truth is probably in the middle in there.

As far as keeping them alive in a tank it's not to hard. I have been working with them for a few years now and we have some at work. They mostly eat shrimp here not fish food. We have raised them from eggs. One of the big issues with raising them in captivity for the long term is we still are not sure how large chunks of their lifecycle works. For example while we have some ideas we do not have definitive proof of how they develop their sex. We think there are genetic factors but if I remember correctly there was a paper published a year or so ago that said there might be a temperature Factor, somewhat like turtles.

Fun fact, they will not eat micro plastics. We had an undergrad doing an experiment to see if they would eat micro plastics and how it would pass through their system but we were never able to get them to even ingest any.

This process is generally not lethal. They are returned to nature once this process is completed, although some do die in the process. Also I'm no expert but those containers might be a collection of multiple crab's worth of blood.

Not trying to defend or attack this process.

You seem quite immune to this meme.

You wouldn't just need the fish food, you would have an aquarium large enough to keep them all alive and meet the legislative standards for wellbeing. That aquarium needs space, cleaners, inspectors, etc, which would drive up the cost considerably.

You nailed it. What’s upsetting is that it’s no longer necessary. A synthetic alternative exists.

It's used for the detection of bacterial endotoxins. We use it's version of white blood cells for it.

Yes, basically!

"Blueberries are fucking purple!!" - Randy Feltface

I mean yeah but all species of horseshoe crabs only live in three places on earth. I can only speak for limulus polyphemus, which only lives on the East Coast of the US (from the Gulf of Mexico to Maine), but I'm not sure how much other species are even bled. Actually to be honest I'm not even sure they have the same extra cellular protein that is collected from the blood.... Possibly should look into that. Maybe I could get some funding to travel to Indonesia for blood samples.

It’s actually…

It’s not going in.