< Coastal biomedical labs are bleeding more horseshoe crabs with little accountability

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Now a report on how pharmaceutical companies use the blood from horseshoe crabs and the effect that's having on the population of that species and the ecosystem in which they live. The blood can be drawn while the crabs are still alive, and the crabs can be returned to nature. But NPR investigative reporter Chiara Eisner found that the companies who do the bleeding may have become more secretive recently about how many crabs die in the process.

CHIARA EISNER, BYLINE: I promise I'm going to get to exactly what horseshoe crabs have to do with vaccines. But first, I need to tell you about a bird that's flying across America right now.

(SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS TWEETING)

EISNER: Red knots are shorebirds about the size of a robin. Every spring, they fly with other migratory birds thousands of miles north from South America on their way to Alaska. The birds usually make just one halfway stop on the beaches near the Atlantic coast. They're hungry, and the most nutritious food they can find are the eggs of horseshoe crabs.

LARRY NILES: There'd be piles lined all along the edge of the shoreline. And so when birds came here, all they had to do was pick up nutritious eggs, get fat, and then get on to the Arctic.

EISNER: I'm walking along one of those beaches in New Jersey with Larry Niles, a wildlife biologist. There are pieces of horseshoe crab shells everywhere. The crabs are 450 million years old. That's 200 million years older than dinosaurs. And they look prehistoric. Picture a big helmet with a tail on the end of it and small, hairy spikes poking out along the sides. The crabs lay eggs only once a year at the exact same time that the birds arrive. But the birds aren't the only ones waiting for them then. Humans want the crabs, too, for their sky blue blood.

NILES: So the horseshoe crabs have a valuable chemical that detects biological contamination in medical devices and drugs that go into people.

EISNER: When horseshoe crab blood comes into contact with a toxin, it starts to clot. That's great for pharmaceutical companies, who need to make sure products that go inside the human body are safe. Companies have been using the blood to test everything from vaccines to medical devices and IVs since researchers discovered its properties in the '60s.

NILES: It's a worldwide business. And at the same time that that business grew, the population of horseshoe crabs declined.

EISNER: In 2021, fishermen in Maryland, New Jersey, Massachusetts and South Carolina pulled more than 700,000 crabs from the waters of the Atlantic coast, more than any other year since regulators started tracking the biomedical harvest. There are five companies that own bleeding facilities here. The operations used to be small local businesses, but they're now mostly part of huge multinational corporations involved in biomedical manufacturing and testing.

NILES: The other species all fell in tandem.

EISNER: Red knot numbers have plummeted by more than 80% in the past 20 years. Since then, the companies have become more secretive. I reached out to every key player in the industry to find out exactly how many crabs were harvested in each state and how many died during the process. I contacted the bleeding companies, fishermen, the coastwide group that manages the harvesters, and the state governments that permit them. Nobody gave up that information.

RICH GORMAN: It remains this really shadowy area, and everyone assumes that everyone else is regulating it.

EISNER: Dr. Rich Gorman is a research fellow who focuses on animal ethics at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School in England. Horseshoe crabs are bled alive. They're pierced in the heart and drained for around eight minutes, which can deplete them of half their blood. Then, after hours spent out of the water, they're allowed to just be dropped back in. Many animals used in the biomedical industry, like rats and monkeys, are protected by federal law. Companies that use them for research have to take special care of them before and afterwards. But those welfare rules don't apply to the crabs.

GORMAN: Thinking of horseshoe crabs as a fishery, it really complicates and muddies the debate.

EISNER: The harvest is overseen by the same regulatory group that manages bass and flounder, fish that are meant to be killed and eaten. That group, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, figures that 15% of the crabs die as a result of the bleeding process. That would have been over a hundred thousand crabs in 2021. But that 15%, it's just an estimate based on limited research. Other research suggests the percentage could be double that. And though the commission does outline best practices for how fishermen and bleeding companies should handle the crabs to minimize injury, those are just suggestions, and they're often ignored. I obtained audio from a January meeting organized by the commission. You can hear someone saying fishermen shouldn't pick the animals up by the tail.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I would argue picking up by the tail is not proper handling technique. I mean, the damage to the tail can increase their chances of not being able to flip over, and they're dying when coming up to spawn.

EISNER: Then, a woman named Benjie Swan jumps in. Swan owns the business that collects crabs in New Jersey.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BENJIE SWAN: I will tell you that we move our crabs mainly by the tail. Most of the time, the crabs are moved around by picking them up by a tail.

EISNER: Research shows that can harm them. But a government representative on the call said that's how they're picked up in Maryland, too. And it's not just how the crabs are taken, it's when. In most states with the harvest but Maryland, fishermen are allowed to take the crabs precisely when the crabs are trying to lay eggs and the birds are trying to find them. And while that's legal, scientists say it may be hurting the ecosystem. For their part, the bleeding companies think other factors, like habitat destruction or harvesting the crabs for bait, are more to blame. But none of them wanted to talk to me.

When I was in New Jersey, I drove up to the address listed for Swan's company in Cape May. I couldn't see a lab there, just a beach house. I asked the two men painting it if they knew her.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: That's our mom.

EISNER: Oh, cool.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: She might be up at the house and...

EISNER: OK, cool. Is the lab around here?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: No.

EISNER: That's when their story changed.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: She's actually not here, so...

EISNER: OK.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Sorry, we're just workers.

EISNER: OK.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: Yep.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Sorry, again.

EISNER: Do you know the best way to reach her? 'Cause I've been trying, but she hasn't been getting back.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Phone call?

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: I'm not sure, yeah. Yeah, just...

EISNER: Swan's company takes less than 2% of all the crabs used by the biomedical industry. The other larger bleeding companies also declined my requests for interviews and a tour of their labs. But the companies aren't the only ones keeping information hidden. Representatives from state governments were happy to tell me about how the industry worked in general until I started asking questions about how many crabs were dying.

It's so nice to meet you.

STEVE DOCTOR: You, too. OK, and then you're going to drive around to that building right there.

EISNER: OK.

Steve Doctor is the biologist at the Department of Natural Resources that manages the horseshoe crab fishery in Maryland. When we got inside his office on Kent Island, he flipped through a PowerPoint he had on his computer.

DOCTOR: So these are actually the eggs. And you can actually see the horseshoe crab inside the egg, like, doing backflips and stuff.

EISNER: But when I pressed him about the numbers of crabs that had died after the harvest, at first, he said he couldn't remember our conversation. And then, he stopped talking to me about it.

You mentioned you didn't feel like we know enough about what happens to those crabs. Could you explain a little bit about how you feel about that? I guess, what are they concerned about?

DOCTOR: OK. Turn off the thing. I don't want to talk about this.

EISNER: OK.

I requested documents from every other state with a biomedical harvest. Each one kept mortality and collection numbers hidden.

CATHERINE WANNAMAKER: It's just really a black box of information both in South Carolina and otherwise.

EISNER: Catherine Wannamaker is an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. She's leading a lawsuit against South Carolina's Department of Natural Resources and Charles River Laboratories, the multibillion-dollar biomedical company that bleeds crabs there.

WANNAMAKER: We, in this lawsuit, contend that the holding ponds are harming the red knot bird because they are depleting the birds' food supply.

EISNER: South Carolina is the only state where fishermen are allowed to keep male crabs in those holding ponds for weeks, unfed and away from the beaches. NPR obtained a redacted copy of the court documents. Information about crab deaths was covered up there again. And the documents also indicated South Carolina turned a blind eye when fishermen broke the rules and put female crabs in the ponds. No one seems to have been punished for that, NPR found through a public records request. Wannamaker says that's typical.

WANNAMAKER: Historically, those conditions have not been enforced or complied with.

EISNER: Charles River Labs has denied liability. But because of the lawsuit, the judge ordered that the harvest be paused across 30 of South Carolina's beaches this year. That still hasn't stopped the company. It just started paying harvesters in other places. Fishermen for Charles River are collecting blood from Cape Cod, Mass., and Chincoteague, Va. When a company representative declined to provide NPR with an interview, she sent an email saying they do their work with a, quote, "healthy respect for the need to protect the horseshoe crab population for generations to come." Some say all that's beside the point, though. Jay Bolden is a scientist that works for Eli Lilly, a major American pharmaceutical company.

JAY BOLDEN: I'm a birder, as a hobby.

EISNER: So he knows how important horseshoe crab eggs are to red knots and that there's an alternative. It was invented decades ago.

BOLDEN: You can copy the DNA, the exact DNA sequence, that produces the natural protein in horseshoe crabs. So if you can make a synthetic version, it does the exact same thing.

EISNER: Bolden helped push the company to switch to the synthetic. Since 2016, Lilly's been using it to test all its new products. He says it's proven superior to the real blood method and cheaper.

BOLDEN: It's actually been cost-advantageous for us. And then, from a quality perspective, we have seen that it is better.

EISNER: Other large pharmaceutical companies are starting to use it, too. But most have not made the switch. Some of them say because U.S. regulators haven't approved the synthetic yet as an equivalent though it has already been approved in Europe. The standard setting body in charge, the U.S. Pharmacopeia, told me that considering the synthetic is a priority for their expert committee this year. But while that committee deliberates, right now, along the Atlantic coast, the crabs are trying to mate, the birds are trying to eat their eggs, and fishermen are still taking the crabs away to be bled.

(SOUNDBITE OF WADING THROUGH WATER)

EISNER: Back on the beach in New Jersey, Niles tells me he believes the labs don't just need to be more transparent; they should also be giving more back to the environment.

NILES: They keep calling it a harvest, and harvest implies stewardship. I started out my career as a game biologist, and in game, you don't have a harvest unless you steward the animal.

EISNER: He says that's not what the bleeding companies are doing.

NILES: These people are not harvesting anything. What they're doing is killing for profit.

EISNER: Until the companies take more responsibility, he says an industry that helps make the world's vaccines could keep damaging the delicate ecosystem across the Atlantic coast. Chiara Eisner, NPR News.

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