Hou, one of the oldest surviving animals on Earth, has a very long history, its history is much earlier than the history of human appearance, older than the extinct dinosaurs, it evolved from the Cambrian trilobite 450 million years ago.
However, why are living fossils that have evolved over hundreds of millions of years and maintained basically no change, now endangered?
【1】 In some places, people have the habit of preying on horseshoe crabs, and horseshoe crabs have become a dish on the table, but people do not know that horseshoe crabs themselves are toxic, and the consumption of horseshoe crabs by people with liver and kidney dysfunction and allergies will seriously affect their health. The human predation of the horseshoe crab is not yet a disaster.
【2】 The only blue blood on the earth in the body of the horseshoe crab is extremely precious to human beings, its blood is rich in copper and appears pale blue, and there is a substance in the blood of the horseshoe crab that is extracted and made into a reagent called the horseshoe reagent, which can be simple, efficient and very accurate to detect drugs and medical supplies.
In today's biotechnology so developed, diseases and viruses are factors that seriously affect the health of human life, to defeat a variety of viruses and diseases need to develop a lot of drugs and do countless scientific research experiments, and the demand for horseshoe reagents is very large, and horseshoe crab blood is the only irreplaceable material on our planet. It can be said that each of us has been blessed by the horseshoe crab, and the bow is said to be the savior of mankind.
Humans therefore captured a large number of horseshoe crabs, using the method of extracting part of the blood and releasing them, in order to find a balance that could meet the needs of use without killing the horseshoe crabs. A large proportion of horseshoe crabs that have been drawn from partial blood will die, and those who survive will be seriously affected by mating, predation, reproduction, and so on.
[3] It takes fifteen years to grow into an adult horseshoe crab, and every time they spawn to survive smoothly, they will experience many dangers, and the proportion of people who can really survive smoothly is very small, coupled with the fact that the breeding environment of the horseshoe crab has been seriously damaged, the horseshoe crab has become less and less, becoming an endangered animal.
Countless facts have proved that humans and animals coexist and die. In 2019, the Chinese horseshoe crab was explicitly listed as an endangered species on the IUCN Red List. In 2021, the Chinese horseshoe crab was listed as a Grade II protected animal.
May we work together, and please give your own space to the born and free horseshoe crab with a magnanimous heart, and to be kind to animals is to be kind to ourselves.