Comment on Yay, milkshakes!
Gullible@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
That’s far more liquid than I expected them to contain. I also expected them to be left alive, not drained dry. Wouldn’t it be more economical to feed them in a large tank for a few weeks, rather than killing them outright? I feel like fish food, by mass, costs 1/10th or less of live horseshoe crabs.
This process is generally not lethal. They are returned to nature once this process is completed, although some do die in the process. Also I’m no expert but those containers might be a collection of multiple crab’s worth of blood.
Not trying to defend or attack this process.
So they don’t get a blueberry fruit juice shake before they go back to their home?
They get various fruit juices after a blood donation, much like a human would, but that’s not what’s pictured here. You can tell because blueberry juice is actually reddish-purple, not light blue.
You seem quite immune to this meme.
You wouldn’t just need the fish food, you would have an aquarium large enough to keep them all alive and meet the legislative standards for wellbeing. That aquarium needs space, cleaners, inspectors, etc, which would drive up the cost considerably.
LostGhost@piefed.social 1 day ago
That is not all from one crab and they generally try not to kill the crabs. There is some debate on how many actually die with the companies bleeding them claiming almost none and some other people saying up to 60%, so the truth is probably in the middle in there.
As far as keeping them alive in a tank it’s not to hard. I have been working with them for a few years now and we have some at work. They mostly eat shrimp here not fish food. We have raised them from eggs. One of the big issues with raising them in captivity for the long term is we still are not sure how large chunks of their lifecycle works. For example while we have some ideas we do not have definitive proof of how they develop their sex. We think there are genetic factors but if I remember correctly there was a paper published a year or so ago that said there might be a temperature Factor, somewhat like turtles.
Fun fact, they will not eat micro plastics. We had an undergrad doing an experiment to see if they would eat micro plastics and how it would pass through their system but we were never able to get them to even ingest any.
Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 22 hours ago
You said they eat shrimp. The micro-nanoplastics are in them.
mojofrododojo@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
pretty sure shrimp are just made entirely out of plastic.