Bound by Blood: Biomedical geographies of shrimp, jellyfish, and horseshoe crabs.

Hannah Dickinson, Elizabeth Johnson & Kristoffer Whitney

This blog highlights some of the biomedical uses of horseshoe crabs, shrimp, and jellyfish. Using (human and nonhuman) blood as a material aspect working across these case studies, we explore how marine animals become entangled within complex global political-economic networks and human bodies, creating new multispecies geographies of illness and health in the process.

Introduction: Discovering underwater pharmacies

Biomaterials extracted from marine organisms play an increasingly prominent role in biomedicine and human healthcare. Many oceanic animals produce bioactive compounds that have been essential in drug development over recent decades. For example, sea sponges produce more chemical compounds than “most (if not all) other animals on the planet” and have been central in generating treatments for HIV, breast cancer and Covid-19.

*A sea-sponge in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica (Source: Wikimedia Commons)*

Globally, 21 drugs from sea creatures have been approved, with 23 more at a clinical trial stage. The ocean and its inhabitants are consequently being characterised as “the world’s untapped and unknown underwater pharmacies”. These narratives foster hope for cures for debilitating human diseases and health conditions, whilst also ramping up the extraction and commodification of ‘unknown’ marine species, materials, and spaces.

Bleeding horseshoe crabs dry?

Since the late 20th century, the biopharmaceutical industry has extracted Limulus Amoebocyte Lysate (LAL) from the blue blood of American horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus), using it as the FDA-approved global standard for detecting fever-inducing endotoxins in vaccines, intravenous medical devices and pharmaceuticals.

In the 1950s and ‘60s, scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, Massachusetts) inadvertently determined that horseshoe crab blood contains a protein which rapidly coagulates in the presence of endotoxins. In a matter of decades, LAL largely replaced the testing of live rabbits to monitor adverse reactions to intravenous drugs. Horseshoe crab blood has since been branded “the miracle ingredient that’s saved millions of lives”.

However, production of LAL is contested. Each year hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs are taken from American beaches to laboratories where upwards of 30% of their blue blood is drained. Live animals are returned to beaches after bleeding, but some inevitably die in the process. There is no consensus on mortality rates, but conservationists place deaths at a rate of between 15-30%. Scientists also suggest bled-crabs exhibit disorientation symptoms, are more susceptible to disease, and may suffer longer-term effects on reproduction.

The LAL industry’s overall impact on horseshoe crab ecologies remains unclear. The 5 licensed US East Coast bleeding facilities are not required to publicly disclose catch rates, quantities of LAL produced, nor to monitor mortality rates post-release. What is known, however, is that horseshoe crabs are “a critical link to coastal biodiversity”. They lay millions of eggs on beaches, providing essential food for marine wildlife and migrating shorebirds including the threatened red knot. Declines in horseshoe crab populations caused by biomedical testing, habitat degradation, or their use as fishing bait are concerning because of the possible cascading effects upon wider multispecies ecologies.

Pressure is mounting on the biomedical industry to eschew LAL extraction. In the 1990s, biologists in Singapore genetically engineered and patented a synthetic, endotoxin-detecting compound known as Recombinant Factor C (rFC) using horseshoe crab DNA and recombinant DNA technology. Japanese and Chinese governments, and the EU have since approved rFC, but the US Pharmacopeia remains reluctant to fully certify rFC for industrial use. So, LAL remains favoured by the global medical industry and pharmaceutical companies for endotoxin detection. Change may be afoot, however, as all key LAL producers now have their own recombinant alternatives waiting in the wings – potentially signalling biomedical futures free from horseshoe crab blood.

The blood of horseshoe crabs and humans have been bound in irrevocable ways, with the health of humans unwittingly hinging on the biological affordances of these "living fossils.” Yet this multispecies entanglement of health carries further animal geographies of illness and decline as threatened shorebirds, and horseshoe crabs themselves, suffer the embodied consequences of the biomedical industry’s continued reliance on LAL.

Shrimp at war

Shrimp and their shells are another unexpected locus of biomedical innovation. Chitosan is a versatile biomaterial extracted from shrimp-shells which offers enormous potential for human healthcare and has been branded “the most promising biomaterial of the 21st century”. Chitosan is antibacterial, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and used as a therapeutic treatment for high blood pressure, high blood sugars, and weight loss – amongst many other conditions. Research continues into chitosan’s capacity for drug-delivery, tissue engineering, disease diagnosis and anti-cancer properties . Thus, a huge seafood industry waste-stream is being incorporated into global biomedical markets to treat ailing human bodies.

Shrimp-derived chitosan is making waves in trauma medicine. Chitosan is haemostatic and can prevent fatal blood losses caused by gunshot, shrapnel, and knife wounds, while inhibiting infection. Biotechnology companies have patented bandages and injectable sponges coated in shrimp-derived chitosan which promise to save lives in combat settings. American and British Armies began using chitosan coated bandages between 2003-2007 in Iraq and Afghanistan. More recently, shrimp-shell bandages have been “saving thousands of lives” on Ukrainian battlefields, where the charity Smart Medical Aid have distributed over 110,000 units.

Shrimp-shell biomaterials are the latest in a series of historical uses of marine animal materials in warfare, including 18th and 19th century fish skin sword grips and cuttlefish ink used for 19th century war photography processes. Yet shrimp-chitosan bandages reveal the diffuse and hidden ways that marine animals are enrolled as 21st century warfare technologies. Innovations in bioscience have produced new microscale-geographies to animal geopolitics and what Erika Cudworth and Steve Hobden call the ‘posthuman way of war’.

As Jairus Grove argues in his book Savage Ecology, human blood remains a potent material (and metaphorical) dimension of contemporary geopolitics. Throughout 20th century conflicts and world wars, human blood was notoriously difficult to manage and manipulate. However, shrimp-chitosan promises to transform battlefield medicine by overcoming challenges posed by blood-loss, whilst binding human and marine animal lives together via embodied molecular interventions.

Such advances to stymie battlefield blood flow have demonstrable practical promise. However, they also unexpectedly entangle marine biologies into the geopolitics of war and raise pertinent questions about whose blood – i.e. lives – are valued or made to matter in these multispecies geographies of biotechnology, blood, and battlefields.

Green light on jellyfish research

Jellyfish – an umbrella term for a wide range of gelatinous zooplankton – have been extensively researched for their biomedical potential since the early 20th century and used as a model organism in neuroscience research. It has been said, that “as an experimental animal, jellyfish could provide the solution” to countless scientific questions about human bodies, including immortality and the embodied effects of microgravity in space.

*A crystal jellyfish (Aequorea Victoria) in Monterey Bay Aquarium, California (Source: Wikimedia Commons)*

In the 1960s, scientists interested in bioluminescence isolated and synthesized Green Fluorescent Protein (GFPs) from crystal jellyfish (Aequorea Victoria) living off Friday Harbour, Washington State. GFP operates in crystal jellyfish bodies by absorbing blue light from the environment and emitting a green glow in response. It is believed that jellyfish produce this glow to ward off predators.

GFPs have revolutionised biomedical research and genetic engineering. After extracting and isolating the glowing protein gene from jellyfish, scientists have inserted this gene into other species commonly used for research into human diseases, including flatworms, tadpoles, and zebrafish. If an animal has this gene, it can produce GFP which is mobilised to selectively make cells light up. This acts as a ‘tagging tool’, enabling scientists to track movements of viruses and bacteria through cells and entire organisms, or to better understand bodily functions related to hormones or the nervous system. This animal research has enabled scientists to bind GFPs to proteins in human blood cells and organs, illuminating cellular processes which may otherwise be undetectable, even under microscope.

Attaching GFPs to proteins in human and animal bodies, effectively shines “a flashlight on the inner workings of cells”. Through these multispecies biomedical entanglements, GFPs have enabled disease identification and advances in understanding blood related conditions including HIV and malaria (as well as cancers, heart disease and diabetes).

However, it is difficult to overlook the irony that a protein produced by jellyfish to defend against predators, has been extracted and manipulated by the Anthropocene’s ‘super predators’ to improve our own health and bodily responses to disease. Whilst knowledge of the biomedical potentials of jellyfish GFPs has bloomed, our understanding of the ecological status and life cycles of these creatures remains underdeveloped. Once thriving crystal jellyfish populations off the coast of Washington State (where original jellyfish GFP research took place) have dwindled for reasons unknown.

In a clear echo of the horseshoe crab case, jellyfish GFPs reveal an extractive asymmetry in the multispecies geographies of health and ill-health that are at work. The human desire to extract and harness these marine organisms for specific socio-economic benefits ultimately overshadows attempts to fill gaps in knowledge about species dynamics in the Anthropocene.

Conclusion

This blog has used human and nonhuman blood as a rhetorical device that bridges the biomedical geographies of horseshoe crabs, shrimp, and jellyfish. In doing so, we aimed to: reveal otherwise hidden human-marine-animal relations that are nonetheless increasingly prominent in biomedical research and associated economic circuits; and to ask questions about how the drive to locate oceanic cures to human diseases and health conditions can produce wider multispecies geographies of illness and health.

As efforts to plunder the ocean’s undiscovered pharmacies ramp up in earnest, this blog demonstrates that it is imperative for animal geographers to engage with these marine spaces and species in order to elucidate how ocean animals circulate through human bodies and economies, with direct implications for marine ecologies.

Hannah Dickinson (hannah.dickinson@manchester.ac.uk)

Hannah is a Simon Research Fellow in the Department of Geography at the University of Manchester, UK. Her research explores the political geographies of human-marine relations and the commodification of marine species. Hannah was previously a PDRA on the Circulatory Entanglements project.

Kristoffer Whitney (kjwgla@rit.edu)

Kristoffer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Rochester Institute of Technology. He holds a PhD in the History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and completed an STS postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Elizabeth Johnson (elizabeth.johnson@durham.ac.uk)

Elizabeth is a writer, researcher, and educator studying how advances in bioscience change understandings of life in the context of environmental precarity. She has written on the developing fields of biomimicry, biosensing, and biomaterial technologies that attempt to harness nonhuman biology in novel ways. As the PI of the Circulatory Entanglements Project, she has been recently researching how narratives of innovation influence scientific understandings of jellyfish and other gelatinous zooplankton.

Learn more about the Circulatory Entanglements Project:

Marine organisms figure centrally in competing narratives of ocean futures. Their depiction as vulnerable victims devastated by over-production are often at odds with promissory Blue Economy policies. Rather than fragility, Blue Economy narratives emphasize the abundance of marine materials and their potentials as biomedical resources. Bridging social science, STS, and environmental humanities methods, the project (2020-2023, funded by The Leverhulme Trust) followed the circulation of three biomaterials emblematic of these tensions. The project developed conceptual and creative outputs for a more comprehensive analysis of marine governance at the intersection of environmental and human health.