500 dead horseshoe crabs have washed up in Japan | Hacker News Reader

500 dead horseshoe crabs have washed up in Japan

sciencealert.com

40 pointswuschel26 comments

Aside from the apocalyptic theme from the website maintainer, this is quiet a comprehensive list of mass animal die offs that have been reported since 2011, when these reports begin skyrocketing.

http://www.end-times-prophecy.org/animal-deaths-birds-fish-e...

http://www.end-times-prophecy.org/mass-animal-deaths-2015.ht...

http://www.end-times-prophecy.org/mass-animal-deaths-2014.ht...

http://www.end-times-prophecy.org/mass-animal-deaths-2013.ht...

http://www.end-times-prophecy.org/mass-animal-deaths-2012.ht...

http://www.end-times-prophecy.org/mass-animal-deaths-2011.ht...

Say goodbye to the blood harvest, an Irish startup are making a biosynthetic replacement! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6Wg9nqdlZU http://www.irishtimes.com/business/innovation-awards-sothic-... (disclaimer: I work for Sothic)

I've been wondering when this would happen, such an obvious thing to target. Cool! Good on the founders, though I see competition in their future.

What is the blood harvest and what does Sothic replace? I'm confused.

Few people know it but the horseshoe crab is the unsung hero when it comes to medical devices and pharmaceutical products. The blood of the crab has unique properties that make it ideal for giving an absolute guarantee that an injectable product or implantable medical device absolutely sterile.

Great news if it works and it's a cost effective replacement!

"Mysteriously".

My first thought (and indeed the end half of the article) points potential blame at the 'harvesting' of blood. Horseshoe crabs are captured, have some blood drained, and then are released. Maybe some group is getting a little to zealous with the harvest.

>Those harvesting this 'blue blood' say they're not killing the crabs to obtain it, but reports have shown that even if crabs that are returned to the ocean afterwards, they tend to die earlier than those that had been left alone.

Looks like it might not be as harmless as they thought.

Considering that they are thrown back into the ocean without parts of their immune system, I find it a miracle that they survive at all.

The "harvest" looks pretty gruesome to me: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/the-bl...

Holy cow

"The industry says that not that many of the animals die. Between 10 and 30 percent of the bled animals, according to varying estimates, actually die"

Doesn't really fit my view of not that many. We seem determined to ruin everything we go near.

I've no clue what horseshoe crab harvest stats are like for asia (Tachypleus), but for the U.S. it's somewhere like several hundred thousand crabs (Limulus) bled each year!

>But now after surviving the last five mass extinctions on Earth, their numbers are suddenly starting to dwindle.

We are fucking things up so badly. Are we actually on track to fix the damage from climate change? Are we doing enough? Are people willing to live with what is really needed to stop climate change? This thing survived 5 mass extinctions, are humans what was really needed to kill it off?

"Are we doing enough?"

This question is spot on. We have this planet, our habitat, in our hands. Overexploition of natural recources can bring our ecosystem in dire straits, and us with it. We can loose so much. About time to use technology to change this. And about time to change out behaviour en masse.

Meh, gotta rewrite our frontend in Angular 2 to impress YC and cash out on our IoT razor blade disposal community.

I take that as bleeding edge sarcasm :^)

There are many startup endeavours that aim to use tech for the better of our ecosystem e.g. all the startups affiliated with the New Harvest Community (http://new-harvest.org).

>> blade disposal

>> bleeding edge

It feels inevitable we're going to end up spraying sulfate into the air to keep cool, because that's by far the cheapest solution to global warming.

It also doesn't fix any of the fundamental problems.

Maybe a sign of (rather unintelligent) industrialized life on other planets would be sulfate aerosol spectra in the atmosphere too consistent to be explained by vulcanism...

No, we are increasing the annual rate of planetary carbon emissions.

Not only are we not fixing it, we are accelerating in the wrong direct.

at this point the elephant in the room is the extinction of humanity. I'm guessing we have 200-500 years left.

I think the species has much, much longer, but our civilization?... we're pretty much dooming that. In a few decades the options will be, "scientific miracle" or, "Slow decline".

That assumes we don't blow up as a species form the conflict which arises as the climate shifts... something we're already seeing a bit of in North Africa for example.

Civilization will be redefined. We are moving to a mass participation, hive-mind, internationalized structure rather than a series traditional country or culture-walled hierarchies with inward-looking tradition.

This is not all bad, but IMHO we have definitely already experienced a distinct loss of clarity of expression across the western world (the letter-writing tradition and books = properly constructed line of reasoning, structured writing, considered communication -> emails and emoji = short, emotional reactions, unstructured/unsupported opine, ill-considered). On the flip side, everyone can communicate and a lot of pedantic grammar laws are becoming irrelevancies. People genuinely care more about being understood than pedantry, and that's a good thing IMHO. As for food/water/environment/waste-management/freedom, on the whole our political systems (exception: China) are not able to effectively reason on those timeframes, and find it easier to pass the blame internationally. We all know where that is leading.

You're talking more about culture, I'm talking about banging the rocks together levels of absolute downfall. I think your view is probably the more optimistic one.

I think it's between "slow decline" and "precipitous collapse".

Nuclear war, sudden energy shortage, food stores wiped out, radiation leak, EMP terrorist attack, Electric grid sabotage, Solar flare EMP, Magnetic pole reversal, sudden economic collapse, sudden ecosystem collapse.

We'd be lucky to "slowly" lose our civilisation to climate change...

Personally I have sworn off the car, and my only significant consumption on this planet is my computer, and my aeroplane journeys. Otherwise it's mostly just food, water and train rides. No idea how else I can contribute...

No, we're not doing enough, and even if human nature suddenly and radically changed overnight we'd still be in trouble. The options now range from massive problems, to 'Game Over' for our civilization.

Keep in mind that if we're knocked back to mud huts, we're not coming back from it this time, we've long since used up the relatively accessible resources that made it happen the first time.

And of course gloabal warming is to blame.

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