HI,
I work in a lab so I am very interested in biology and variations that occur in nature , Most animals on this planet use iron to hold o2 in the blood with hemaglobin, now there is one exception and thats horseshoe crabs, they use copper in their blood to move o2.
Now here's the question most animals ( humans and Others) need small amount of iron in their diet or they can't produce healthy red blood cells, If a horseshoe crab need copper would he provide some benafit to a sump by leaching out small amount of copper in the system to make blood as he grows larger.
Many animals need alot of iron durin that growth curve, most crabs grow most of their life. so my question is this will horseshoe crabs help reduce and copper load in a system as they grow larger. So keeping a small horseshoe crab may provide some heavy metal protection.
Just a thought. Guess what color their blood is..
Doug
I may start googling for info, I know there's a lab doing some type of research on their blood, for medical reasons.
hope this is interesting you too.
ps their blood is blue...
(((The medical profession uses an extract from the horseshoe crab's blue, copper-based blood called lysate to test the purity of medicines. Certain properties of the shell have also been used to speed blood clotting and to make absorbable sutures.
)))
more stuff I love google.....
Horseshoe crabs are extremely valuable as a species to the medical research community. The horseshoe crab has a simple, but amazing immune system. When a foreign object (bacteria) enters through a wound in their body, it almost immediately clots into a clear, gel like material, thus effectively trapping the bacteria. This substance is called Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL) and is being used to test for bacterial endotoxins in pharmaceuticals and for several bacterial diseases. If the bacterium is harmful, the blood will form a clot. Horseshoe crabs are proving to be very helpful in finding remedies for diseases that have built immunities against penicillin and other drugs. A horseshoe crab is returned to water after extraction of a portion of its blood; therefore, tests are not a threat to the survival of horseshoe crabs. A single horseshoe crab can be worth $2,500 over its lifetime for periodical blood extractions. The blood of horseshoe crabs is blue, which is a result of a high content in copper-based hemocyanin instead of the iron-based hemoglobin found, for example, in humans.
final one I promise
Bacteria are everywhere-from our intestinal tract, to soils, rivers, and oceans. For the most part, bacteria are beneficial, acting to degrade organic waste and recycle nutrients back into the food chain. Sometimes, however, bacteria cause disease. We are all familiar with many specific bacterial diseases such as Salmonella food poisoning or more serious ones such as Cholera and Tetanus.
Bacteria that cause these diseases are referred to as pathogens and usually require an animal host for multiplication or transmission even though they may persist in a soil or aquatic environment for long periods of time. Other bacteria, generally considered non-pathogenic, can cause disease if they enter parts of our body that are usually bacteria-free, such as the bloodstream. In this case, even the ordinarily benign gut bacterium E. coli can cause sepsis and death. Therefore, the pharmaceutical industry takes great care in producing drugs, vaccines, and medical devices (items that deliver drugs or are implanted) that are sterile-free of living microorganisms. Unfortunately, certain bacterial components can, in and of themselves, be toxic. Thus, pharmaceutical manufacturers not only need to be sure their products are sterile but also non-toxic, i.e., contain no bacterial components left from pre-sterilization bacterial contamination.
Illustration credit Charles River Endosafe, SC
The bacterial toxin of greatest concern is termed endotoxin, and it is able to withstand steam sterilization. Endotoxin occurs as part of the cell structure of a large class of bacteria that includes both pathogens and non-pathogens. This class of bacteria is known as Gram-negative, for their characteristic of being easily decolorized during the Gram staining procedure. Surprisingly, it is the non-pathogenic members of the Gram-negative group, those that love aquatic environments, which cause the most problems for the pharmaceutical industry.
Over fifty years ago it was recognized that some sterile solutions, when injected into humans or rabbits, caused a fever or pyrogenic response. Scientists soon learned that these so-called "injection fevers" were caused by endotoxin (a potent pyrogen) left over from bacterial components that remained in the injected solutions after sterilization. Fortunately, it was also found that solutions could be screened for pyrogens by injecting small amounts of the batch into rabbits. If the rabbit exhibited a fever, the solution was deemed pyrogenic and was rejected. The rabbit or pyrogen test, along with a sterility test, became the two most important tools of the pharmaceutical industry. The Pyrogen Test employing rabbits is still in limited use, although as you will see below, an endotoxin test using an extract from the blood cells of the horseshoe crab is the predominant pyrogen test today.
How was the horseshoe crab test discovered?
In the 1960's, Dr. Frederik Bang, a Johns Hopkins researcher working at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, found that when common marine bacteria were injected into the bloodstream of the North American horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, massive clotting occurred. Later, with the collaboration of Dr. Jack Levin, the MBL team showed that the clotting was due to endotoxin, a component of the marine bacteria originally used by Dr. Bang. In addition, these investigators were able to localize the clotting phenomenon to the blood cells, amebocytes, of the horseshoe crab, and, more importantly, to demonstrate the clotting reaction in a test tube. The cell-free reagent that resulted was named Limulus amebocyte lysate, or LAL. The name LAL is extremely descriptive: Limulus is the generic name of the horseshoe crab, amebocyte is the blood cell that contains the active components of the reagent, and lysate describes the original process used by Levin and Bang to obtain these components. In Levin and Bang's process, amebocytes, after being separated from the blue-colored plasma (hemolymph), were suspended in distilled water where they lysed (ruptured) due to the high concentration of salt contained in the amobocytes versus the absence of salt in the distilled water. Surprisingly, this same process with some minor modifications is still used today to produce LAL.
How does the horseshoe crab protect itself from disease?
One may wonder why the horseshoe crab is sensitive to endotoxin and, furthermore, how does the crab benefit from this phenomenon? As we know, seawater is a virtual "bacterial soup". Typical near-shore areas that form the prime habitat of the horseshoe crab can easily contain over one billion Gram-negative bacteria per milliliter of seawater. Thus, the horseshoe crab is constantly threatened with infection. Unlike mammals, including humans, the horseshoe crab lacks an immune system; it cannot develop antibodies to fight infection. However, the horseshoe crab does contain a number of compounds that will bind to and inactivate bacteria, fungi, and viruses. The components of LAL are part of this primitive "immune" system. The components in LAL, for example, not only bind and inactivate bacterial endotoxin, but the clot formed as a result of activation by endotoxin provides wound control by preventing bleeding and forming a physical barrier against additional bacterial entry and infection. It is one of the marvels of evolution that the horseshoe crab uses endotoxin as a signal for wound occurrence and as an extremely effective defense against infection.
And you thought those Sea SPiders were Uggly........
There's the bell class is out......SORRRRYYYYY
Horseshoe crabs 
But I have a question, If the Crab died in your system and you were unaware that it died, Would it release copper back into your system as it decomposed ? 
