The New York State (NYS) legislature hopes no veto will again hound its June 12, 2025 ban on horseshoe crab harvest for biomedicine (biomed) purposes.
This latest attempt to protect the vulnerable critters follows the passing of a bill by both the state’s Assembly and the Senate.
The ban seeks to reinstitute the similar Horsheshoe Crab Protection Bill of June 2024 that the NYS Democrat governor Kathy Hochul eventually vetoed.
Could it happen again? If a governor’s moratorium once again dashes hopes, the bill will at least have had some concerned ecologists behind it.
For one, the head of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment in Long Island, Adrienne Esposito, states that “things have gotten worse.”
Esposito implied that protection of the crustacean also cushions red knot birds that thrive on horseshoe crab eggs during their migration.
Enter Biomedicine
At the center of the latest NY ban is the biomedical industry, which catches and blood-lets the crabs without killing them.
The creature’s blue blood sells richly at about $60,000 a gallon, for it helps identify microbes in pharmaceuticals and vaccines. The specimen themselves have no vibrant commercial market and sell at ordinary crab prices in the United States.
Although New York’s biomed industry has lessened its use of the blue blood, the state still seeks a biomedicine harvest ban.
Other than medics, fishermen sometimes use the precious crabs as bait for conch snails and eels. The practice has been diminishing lately, involving only a dozen scattered fishers, especially in Long Island.
So, will the NY governor once again carve out to the fishing and biomed industries by vetoing the horseshoe crab bill? The statistics below meanwhile offer a general overview of the biomedicine sector of horseshoe crab blood.
Statistics on Horseshoe Crab Market in the Biomed Industry
New York and 14 other eastern states have the highest horseshoe crab populations in the United States. Although many of these states have limited fishing to 150,000 female crabs annually, environmentalists want lower limits. The biomedicine industry, on the other hand, catches and releases around 0.5 million crabs per year. For this reason, anti-harvest legislations have been mounting, including back-to-back June 2024 and 2025 New York governmental bans. The neaby state of Delaware, in its part, has already dedicated some 1,500 miles of offshore sanctuary to the critters.
What is the net worth of the biomed blue blood industry?
Some studies put the annual global market worth of blue blood for biomedicine and other purposes at $112 million. Free market prices of the blood average $15,000 a gallon while medical labs buy it at $60,000 per 3.79 kg.
Why is the biomed harvest of horseshoe crabs unsustainable?
The 500,000 horseshoe crabs that researchers use alive each year leads to 10 to 30% mortality rate for the returnees. This makes the catch-and-release harvest to pass as unsustainable.