Deep Dive: Dr. Larry Niles, How Has Horseshoe Crab Blood Helped You?

The fact that we rely on Horseshoe crab blood to test all of our internal medical devices and vaccines is stunning! And the fact that we are affecting the environment in such a drastic fashion yet have a synthetic alternative that we can turn to is wild. Yet we still remain crab vampires in the name of healthcare!

In this episode we learn all about Horsehsoecrabs, why we need them, what we do with their blood and why you should care! We talk with Dr. Larry Niles from the Horseshoecrab Recovery Coalition and boy do we get into it!

For more information about the Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition Click here. Check out  Dr. Larry Niles blog about his work right here.

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Transcript

David Evans: 0:25

Welcome to today's deep dive episode today. We're talking all things horseshoe crab. So horseshoe crabs, why should I care? And what does that have anything to do with the medical industry, horseshoe crab blood is uniquely sensitive to bacteria. It's so sensitive, in fact that it actually is being used as the number one test to be able to understand if a biomedical instrument will be able to be implanted in the body or not. So we actually use a lot of horseshoe crab blood to test for contaminants. Annually, we bleed about 600,000 horseshoe crabs simply to just use their blood to test for contaminants. And this along with the industry of actually catching horseshoe crabs to use them as bait to catch other fish has led to a big decrease in the population of horseshoe crabs along the eastern seaboard of the United States, which has led to a huge decrease in a lot of other species, as this is a keystone species that supports the life of basically the entire ecosystem. So today, we're talking with Dr. Larry Niles, from the horseshoe crab recovery coalition. We'll be learning all about the sustainability of this industry, the ecosystem effects and why we should actually care and also about the synthetic alternative that we aren't using right now. I mean, it's crazy. We're still bleeding crabs so that we can test medical devices. How is this affecting so sit back relax and get ready to learn a little bit about horseshoe crabs? That sir G. nippy oh me No, in zero to marry a child why water we doing? And how can we do better? Your one stop shop for everything water related from discussing water its use and the organisms that depend on it for all the global issues that you really never knew all had to do with water. I'm your host, David Evans from the aquatic biosphere project. And I just want to ask you something. What are we doing? How can we do better? Hi there and welcome to another deep dive episode of the water we doing Podcast. Today. I'm speaking with Dr. Larry Niles, from the horseshoe crab recovery coalition. So Larry, do you mind just introducing yourself giving our listeners a little bit about yourself and the horseshoe crab recovery coalition.

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 3:33

So I am a partner in a small group called Wildlife Restoration partnerships that focuses on research and primarily on shorebirds, particularly the red dot and horseshoe crab. But we also do management of beaches for horseshoe crab spawning habitat, and other reasons resiliency and so on our work centers in Delaware Bay, but we do work from the Canadian Arctic, you know, in the area of Southampton Island to Victoria Island. And we've done work in Mangan islands in Quebec. But we also do work all the way south. We've done work and turned off way ago, Chile and we have a project now and go into Pash Brazil. So you know, we do a lot of work on shorebird slept because we are sort of home base is Delaware Bay. It's a lot about horseshoe crabs because Delaware Bay is one of the top world stopovers for Arctic nesting shorebirds who you know make these dramatically long distance migrations down to turtle fly go 10,000 mile journey and then a on their way back. They have to cross the ocean to get back to North America, deplete all their resources because they're flying up there seven days at a time and then they arrive in Delaware Bay and they are ecological circumstances they arrived just as horseshoe crabs start spawning on the bay beaches. They lay pony eggs in clusters about six inches deep but there's so many crabs that after a certain amount of spawning every new crab that comes in to lay eggs digs up the eggs of Another crab so they come up to the surface and and that way the birds can eat them and their eggs so they birds quickly gain weight on Edit time in spring when all the natural resources are at their lowest level, these eggs allow them to build weight at, you know, the highest rates in the world. Some birds we've caught and recaptured have gained in that just that intervening period 15 grams a day. And when they arrive in Delaware Bay, they're only about 120 grams. So 15 grams a day very quickly, they get up to the weight that they need to go on to the Arctic, where they have enough fat that they can start nesting and lay eggs. And then by the time the chicks hatch, the Arctic is thawed and then you know, life goes on. So the idea of the crab horseshoe crab recovery coalition, we started out trying to build the resources for protection of crabs and Delaware Bay. But then we quickly realized that there's network of people that already exist, they care about crabs, in all the places where they now breed. So very small populations that go from Florida to almost domaine, but see all of those populations have suffered the same threat that Delaware Bay is threatened by which is overharvest for bait fishers will use crabs for bait to catch bait fish, they use bait to catch bait. The main problem is the crabs are also bled for the biochemical lysate. And that is an unregulated industry that is just creating havoc and all the small populations along the coast. So our strategy here is to try to work with groups all along the coast sort of bind us together with this common thread and try to rebuild population to the Delaware Bay level, but all along the coast. So essentially, we want to reestablish this historic resource for shorebirds that once existed, but now is lost because all these populations are over harvest.

David Evans: 7:37

That is Yeah, that's a it just strikes me as thinking of these horseshoe crabs almost as the only truckstop along the way between Chile and the Arctic and the the main refueling station. And yeah, it's it's it's a super, it's really interesting. So myself on now is quite young. I have fond memories of being down in Florida visiting family and finding horseshoe crabs that had washed up on the beach, and just thinking they were the absolute strangest things I've ever seen. So do you mind just for those who may not be familiar with a horseshoe crab? Could you just describe them, and what they look like and where they can be found?

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 8:27

Sure. First of all, they're 425 million year old species. So they've been around the block and they look like it. The goal here isn't to save the crabs because you know, they're going to be here long after humans are lost. So the goal is to try to build up the populations to make them more robust. So the crabs are, you know, roughly about dish size, the males are smaller females could get to the size of a baseball home plate. The males could also get fairly large, but they're that size differences consistent throughout the whole range. They vary in size as you go north. The populations are more or less genetically defined, but there's a lot of overlap. So it's hard to say you know, this crab is from Delaware Bay or that crab is from somewhere else. They typically need a sandy substrate to dig their eggs which is about six inches down. But they've also laid eggs in Shell rakes like you know, oyster piles of oyster shells and they also nest in Marsh marks. The difference is the productivity like the productivity of a nest of eggs laid in Marsh mark is very low because the decomposing marks give off sulfurous you know air that kills the eggs, so you get very low survival in the shell rakes. The survival is probably good but they have difficulty digging into the brakes. So sandy beaches are the best habitat. We've done a lot of work constructing beaches for horseshoe crabs spawning and for people and the best beaches are about two feet deep of sand so that there's lots of room for them to dig but also, there's a substantial area, buffering them from whatever underlies the sand, in most places, Muck underlies sand. So, you know, you got to worry about those hydrogen sulfide gases, so they don't use it and they need low energy. You don't usually see crabs spawning on Atlantic coast beaches because there's too much wave action. But like it inlets, you know, you have a sandy spit. And then behind that Tandy spit is really the typical habitat all along the east coast. But there are special places like Delaware Bay, Chincoteague Bay, Jamaica Bay in New York, where the bays themselves are low energy, but they're still saline, and they have sandy beaches. So then that's the place is where you get millions of crabs coming ashore. These events are, you know, like you see in around the world where you have these terrific spawning events, salmon dying in streams or grunion on the Atlantic on the Pacific coast. In this case, this sort of marquee use is the shorebirds. But in every place where these eggs are allowed to build up to densities that we're talking about, mostly eggs are going to the marine fish and crabs. In Delaware Bay, for example, before they overall harvested the crabs down to the level that they are now we used to have a vibrant sport fishery like weak fish, there used to be somewhere in the area of two to 3 million pounds a year were harvested either by sport fishers or by commercial fisheries. Now it's down to 44,000 pounds, because the loss of the crabs and the loss of the eggs and the loss of the young that hatch from those eggs, pull the rug out from a lot of the forage fish that the sport fish are eating, because all those species are also breeding. And so they're making use of horseshoe crab eggs. And so in other words, when I'm trying to say is that the horseshoe crabs represent a productive layer of almost all estuaries on the East Coast. And so fishers are defeating their own purpose by catching them for something is insignificant is bait.

David Evans: 13:03

Yeah, they're, they're really undermining their entire purpose with it sounds to me like you're describing a keystone species that without them being at that level, that the entire ecosystem changes.

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 13:18

That's right. That's exactly the right term.

David Evans: 13:22

Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. And just thinking about that exchange of energy from ocean to upland systems, and especially with birds that are migrating across continents, and in changing how those those energy cycles work with providing food to them. That's yeah, there's a lot there's a lot to go on here. I'm glad we're talking.

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 13:50

And see that shapes that coalition's, too when we first started out, we thought, you know, we bind together the usual players, you know, conservation group, and we did like National Wildlife Federation, National Audubon defenders for wildlife, they're all part of the coalition. But see, because we're talking about a valuable biochemical. You know, soon we'll talk about eventually, it also brings in Eli Lilly, the drug company, as part of the coalition. And Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is part of the coalition. But we also have groups like Manhattan defenders, and sport fishing guides association. So you know, what we're doing is binding together a coalition that sort of addresses this very difficult conservation problem. It's one that plagues every natural resource right now, whether it's forestry or agriculture industry is consuming, not just the sort of top level product of a system, they're commodifying every layer of that system. So that right, basically removing all the productivity from ecosystems. And, you know, our whole climate change initiative depends on functioning ecosystems. So it's an interesting problem, as you know, I'm sure you see, but it's also an interesting solution. You can't rely on the normal method, a bunch of conservation groups get together and say this is what it should be. This is more like, let's all work together to try to figure out how we can solve this.

David Evans: 15:30

It almost sounds like a joke of a bird biologist, a sports Fisher and pharmaceutical representative walk into a bar or something like that. It's just it seems like a weird, weird group of people that work together. So I guess on that note, you already mentioned lysates, and of horseshoe crabs being harvested for the biomedical field, can you just give a bit of an intro to that and how that started and where we are with that today?

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 15:59

Yeah, so every medical product drugs, hip implants, pacemakers, whatever are tested with a biochemical from horseshoe crab blood called lysate. So what it does is the drug companies have created a testing assay that allows them to determine if there's any contaminant in the components, like they test water and all the various components of drugs, and then they test them in their final development, so that the public can be assured that there's no contamination in these drugs or in, you know, whatever device going into your body. And see, this is a great improvement, because previously, they used rabbits to test. And so that's cruel, obviously cruel. And so this is innovation for sure. The problem now is that the people who are doing the bleeding, which are not the the giant pharmaceutical companies, there are multinational companies that are segments of multinational companies that are basically just after profit. And, you know, they're working with the agencies, who are really just concerned about creating bait for industry. So, you know, these two groups are sort of, you know, in the same pocket, and the bleeding of the crabs, they bleed them for eight minutes. So they put them up on a spike into the heart, and they bleed them as much as they'll bleed for eight minutes. Killing, they say 15%, peer reviewed replications of the bleeding process, say 30%. But it could be more because an eight minute bleed affects bigger crabs than smaller cracks. So a small crab might bleed 30% of their blood, whereas a bigger female could lead up to half their blood volume. And so then they just let them go. And nobody's tracking how many die after they leave. And from an outside view, I should say, at least 30% are dying in the process of bleeding. And then they're dying when they're being caught because they're catching withdrawals. And you know, so that's a very brutal process that leaves a lot of animals. So what's the total cost of this? We don't, it would be good if it was regulated in such a way that we could examine what they're doing. But sort of arcane rules of marine fisheries in the US, allows this company to hide all their data. So nobody can see what's actually happening. We just had to take their word for it. And these are multinational companies, I don't know how many multinational companies you would take your and see the other problem is, is actually an opportunity. And a synthetic now exists. So we could go to the third stage here started out rabbits, and it went to animal another animal but less brutal than the previous method. But now we could go to a synthetic. And that synthetic was actually developed like over 10 years ago by a scientist in Japan. And then one of the drug companies, one of the bleeding companies bought the patent did nothing, so essentially kept it out of the market. The patent expired several years ago. And so since then, drug companies like Eli Lilly, have already used the synthetic for both their product development and for final product testing drug company, Pfizer just did a head to head test between the LAL and the synthetic and found no differences. But all the other leading companies have synthetic alternatives. One company that does most of the bleeding, Charles River associates, it currently doesn't have synthetic alternatives developed. So they challenged the efficacy of the synthetic and published the paper that said that they were not equivalent. They did a test. But groups within our coalition like Physicians for Responsible Medicine and another group revive and restore. And the companies that are involved biome Are you is a company in our coalition along with Eli Lilly, it basically went to work and found that the company Charles River had sort of deliberately manipulated by starting with something called Dirty water, which is water that is not purified before it goes into product development. And so this 30 Water includes a contaminant that they knew the synthetic wouldn't detect. But no drug company uses 30 water. So it was a sort of artificial restriction that led the FDA and the US Pharmacopoeia to essentially reverse their earlier positions that they were going to include the synthetic and existing chapter that would allow the companies to just use Lal or RFC, depending on what they wanted. All of a sudden, they said that we required a new chapter, which would require all the companies to do testing. And then eventually, they would say that Lal and RFC are equivalent. So right now, it's in that period of flux. I think it the way it looks is because of Pfizer's new data. And because of the influence of the drug companies and our influence, because the other side of the equation here is that the pharmaceutical companies have committed to not using animal testing, if they don't have to. And so this is pitting them against that ideal. I hope that it'll change this year.

David Evans: 22:23

It really brings to light especially with the pandemic and all the talk about vaccines, and just thinking that everyone who has been vaccinated has horseshoe crabs to think for that we normally think of animal testing, associated more with I mean, rabbits as had been previously done and, and thinking of like a more of a Malian counterpart to test on mammals such as ourselves, but it just strikes me as being such a not a not an easy connection to make of thinking as horseshoe crabs as being the as horseshoe crabs having something in their blood that's been with them for 400 million years, that's really helped to protect them that now we can harness to protect us and and, and how we we procreate synthetic everything it seems these days, but we haven't switched to, we're still bleeding horseshoe crabs to to test medical devices and ourselves. It just seems it just seems quite archaic, archaic for this day and age.

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 23:24

It is I agree. And you know, it's money. You know, there's businesses, there's investors, there's, you know, everybody has expectation of profit. This is natural resources in our age. I mean, everybody wants to make money off of every single layer of our ecological world. And you know, it doesn't work that way. You start pulling out the blocks, you know, and eventually the whole thing's going to come crashing down. And, you know, as I said earlier, pulling out the horseshoe crab block was a significant ecological action that nobody even realized because it was pulled out before anyone knew of the value like even here in Delaware Bay. The crabs spawn was amazing. It was I have a 1986 video of crabs mining. The harvest of horseshoe crabs was only maybe 100,000 A year or so in Delaware Bay. And then within a few years, it went up to 2.5 million. And it was because the way you wanted bait for a conch fishery, and very quickly, they the egg densities on Delaware Bay went from like 50,000 eggs per square meter on the surface two now went as low as 7000. Right now it's about 10,000. But in 1986, I could see in this video that there was wind rows of eggs, so it wasn't like there was an egg here like there. It was piles of eggs pushed up by the wild tie, and you know, all of that was going into the sea. And, you know, birds fish crabs, mean Blue Claw crabs, like all the The elements of productivity that we enjoy. were all like, you know, just knocked out at the knees. Nobody documented these values before it occurred. And then we were left with trying to restore it after it was already done. And see, that's where most of the other horseshoe crab populations are now. And, you know, I have to say it's where a lot of natural resources are right now.

David Evans: 25:50

Yeah, it's another example in the water space of tragedy of the commons, a common resource where without regulatory control, everyone just has free will to go and do what they want. And because they're not a big charismatic species, they're not it's not it's not a panda out there that were bleeding and everyone's losing their minds over it's a crab that you can't really can't really look inside and connect with it. But for for everyone, everyone who's listening to this podcast, if you could give them an empowered speech of why they should care. Why, why should the listeners care about horseshoe crabs?

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 26:25

For the people in Canada, I have to say there's a value, because all of this craziness led to a listing of the red not the red not went from, you know, in Delaware Bay went from 95,000 birds each spring. Last year, it's now down to 6800. This is a Canadian species. Yes, there's two sub species, one's breeding in the western part of the Arctic in Alaska. And then the segment that we're working on is all of Nunavut, basically. So there's that, you know, Canadians, I think, have a special or interest and Canadian Fish and Wildlife Service and Environment Canada have taking really leadership roles and in helping defend the birds, to some extent more so than US agencies, state agencies and US state agencies forget about their most of them are dominated by marine fisheries interests. I think, you know, from a wider perspective, it's a precautionary tale, because if we're ever going to deal with climate change, we need electric cars, we need to restrict methane, you know, all that stuff. That's certain. But the best way to sequester carbon is that functioning ecosystems and fully functioning ecosystems not like, you know, yeah, you can see Quester carbon in a form field. But you're not going to get the same carbon benefits as you work from a fully functioning ecosystem. The third thing is that we like seafood. And, you know, if you want to eat seafood, and you need to have a productive system, we depend on these animals for Lal, but who knows why, what we depend on them in the future. See, I think to some extent, like I was chief of the Endangered Species Program for the state of New Jersey, for, you know, most of my career, the emphasis was always on endangered species. It's funny because you can look at the arc of my career, and you could say, you try to sell this, you try to sell this, you try so that you end up with horseshoe crab or some other counterpart. To protect endangered species, you need to have functioning ecosystems, and you can't just protect a species, independent of all of the world that it lives within. You know, the precautionary tale here, I think overall, is we need the systems we need it for danger species, we need it for, you know, our own edification for our own health. But it used to be the argument was take away a block, you take away this block, eventually systems will fail. I'm here to say the systems are have already failed. Now we need to start rebuilding them. And the way to do that is restore all these other values. Like an example of these other values is here in Delaware Bay were while they were destroying the crabs, they were arguing, we got to do this, we need the jobs. And so they basically destroyed the robust population. And then in the process, we lost 1000s of jobs because all the Marine is now are closed because there's no fish. But the restaurants have closed overnight. motel type things are closed the income from dramatic levels of tourism, it's all gone. So the make 10 jobs or whatever it was 20 jobs. We've lost economic support for our communities. Like that's the price that we pay for allowing industry to just come in and take and then leave

David Evans: 30:19

it Yep, that's that's a very, very compelling case, to care about horseshoe crabs. So I guess what are what are some of the ways that we've talked about horseshoe crabs their value? What's being currently done with them? So I guess, what are some of the strategies that are being employed by the horseshoe crab recovery coalition, or the groups that are interested in the recovery of this, of this, this population to previous levels to support these ecosystems? So what is it more looking at? At policy levels that being at being an advocate at a government events? Or? Or is it talking to industry specifically, actually

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 31:03

sort of all of it so the coalition has several working teams. The one group though is persisted is the LAL RFC group. So that's populated by the companies by conservation groups by the group's like positions, like a wide variety of people have different interests, and arrow working together? To figure out what the next action should be just a series of actions like letters to the US farm and compare the one group physicians at a round table with industry reps. So that's one part of it is doing everything we can to get RFC adopted, because we consider that a basic management goal. The second is that we have sort of several groups working on policy issues. If you take a horseshoe crab, or you causing a take of an endangered species, red knots, like that's a big question, right? The agencies haven't really made that declaration, but we think it's the case. If you have 10 Crabs, you might have a nest in the sand that never go to the surface. But if you have 100 Crabs, then you'll have eggs on the surface. In other words, every crab counts. So a take of a crab should be a take of the species. So that sort of basic policy issue is behind a lot of our other actions, like we're reaching out to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, we're reaching out to individual states, the regulatory systems within each state. And to do that, we've also created state level working groups. So these are groups of people who belong to the coalition, but their actions are restricted to that particular state. So right now we have I think we have eight state working groups from Georgia to Massachusetts. Like, for example, the New York working group helped introduce legislation last year that got tabled for political reasons, but they're working on state legislation. Right now, what we're starting up is where we did a pilot last year, but we're going into full mode now is working off the state working groups, develop teams of volunteers, that will go out and count crab and eggs, tag them, and also carry out stewardship. So if there's shorebirds there, then protect the shorebirds and to start programs to flip crabs because the or rescue them from impingement. So saving crabs lives like we do that on Delaware Bay, a group called return a favor, but that idea we would like to spread. So that's the sort of multi prong approach of the coalition.

David Evans: 34:08

That's great. It's an organic thing that continues to snowball out. That's wonderful to hear.

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 34:13

You know, I'm a lifelong biologist as yourself, although you're half my age of that. But I think this is unique, you know, it's 45 different groups. It's not just conservation groups, it's wide range of groups. And we're not competing. And see, I feel like that's one of the problems in conservation right now, is that I'm going to say this starkly. I think that, you know, our agencies are being overly influenced by the short term needs of industry. And conservation groups are left to fight for money competing against each other because it's usually grants. I mean, you know, this, yeah, you're going for grants. You go into foundations, you're looking for rich donors. And it's hard for conservation groups to work together vitally. I mean, they all work together because we're all in it for the same reason. I'm not trying to disparage that. It's just that there's that competitive aspect that fracture means the constituency into smaller political voices. And you know, so that you end up with a foe, the short term use of our natural resources, that's heavily influencing government. And then you have this fractious group of concerned citizens that probably numbers the majority of our population, but can't develop the voice to make change. So I think the craft coalition is, is sort of breaking the mold there or pulling together people. We're working collaboratively. Right now we have a proposal into the Atlantic flyway shorebird initiative. And if we are able to get money, we're going to share it with the state working groups. It's not like our groups, working groups, these are built from whatever works best in each state. So you know, we're trying to develop a new perspective on conservation.

David Evans: 36:20

I'm thoroughly impressed and very excited and yet passionate people from different walks of life all working together, but being able to actually come together as one voice and, and that's really special in this field. So I guess how could someone who's listening to this podcast, maybe they're up here in Canada? How could they lend a hand and how could they help horseshoe crabs or help horseshoe crab coalition?

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 36:46

Series? No breeding I don't know that there's any breeding horseshoe crabs in Canada are unsure.

David Evans: 36:51

Yeah, we'll have to do some research and they'll add that to the notes and to hear

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 36:56

I think they run out with me what's possible that they're in the Maritimes so that's one thing is to start finding out if there is any,

David Evans: 37:05

oh, we do have horseshoe crabs in Canada, except they are 100 million year old fossils in Manitoba. So currently know breeding populations.

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 37:14

You know, funding of course, we have a new button on our website that will allow people to donate. I have to tell you that you know, we do a trapping of shorebirds every year. We've been doing it for now 25 years and that team is volunteer base and a lot of our team is coming from Canada from Toronto Mark pack from the Royal Ontario Museum and, and then also the people of Environment Canada like Paul Smith, they provide a lot too. I guess I could say that the opportunity to volunteer for Canadians it would have to be like a vacation come down to Delaware Bay, spend a week and volunteer we have a volunteer crab rescue. We have volunteer stewardship for each of the beaches protecting the red knots, we have a sort of brand of volunteer ism for doing surveys, of course you crabs directed by a staff person, but the people doing the tagging or the counting are our volunteers. The key thing is not a day, you know, not a few days, enough time so that if you're trained, right, you could play it out for enough time that it's worth it. And then there's money, you know, you can always give money. Yeah.

David Evans: 38:36

Exactly. That's, that's wonderful. It sounds like a great vacation to be honest. Weather is great.

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 38:42

Here in Callaway, and it's one of the I think it's the main reason why we have Canadians because they just need to get

David Evans: 38:50

snow. Exactly. So I guess my final question is what led you to being involved in this project and what led you into this career path?

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 38:59

I you know, it's probably a familiar story for you. I mean, when I was young, I was a hunter and Fisher and my father, you know, so I, I was one of those people. I knew what he wanted to do. When I went to college, I wanted to be a game warden. And so then it just went on from there. I got a master's degree at Penn State, eventually a PhD. But after I had my master's degree was all working. You know, I worked for Georgia Fish and Wildlife, I worked for Clemson ventually for New Jersey fish and wildlife and now on my own, and I'm 70 years old, so I shouldn't be retired. But, you know, this is what I love to do. If I retired, this is what I would do. I actually did retire but I kept going. The reason is because you know, like a lot of people I love this work.

David Evans: 39:53

Oh, that's that's fantastic to hear. It's still work, but when you love it, it's hard to let it go. Thank you so much for speaking with me today. I feel like I've learned so much about horseshoe crabs and it's interesting to hear how maybe something that gets overlooked by a lot of people can just play such an important integral role and then really can become a way for people to connect dots that seemed very difficult to connect previously. So thank you so much for speaking with To me when I post the show notes for this episode, there'll be links to the website for the horseshoe crab coalition and for the social media as well them so that listeners will be able to find and connect with the coalition as well.

Dr. Larry Niles, Horseshoe Crab Recovery Coalition: 40:32

Thank you, David, this was interesting to talk to you and I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the coalition's.

David Evans: 40:46

Thanks for listening to today's episode all about horseshoe crabs, medical devices, and what we're doing about this synthetic alternative. Thanks so much to Dr. Larry Niles. He is a great guest. And I learned so much from him just so excited to make my way down to Delaware Bay and see the crab spawn for myself. For more information about the horseshoe crab recovery coalition. You can find out more about their work at H s crab recovery.org. And I'll leave a link for his own website as well where you can keep up to date with what's going on in the crab world and in the bird world. And basically, everything you need to know about Delaware Bay, be sure to check out the show notes. As I'll leave links for all of these plus lots of other information, just in case it's just whet your palate and you can't wait to learn more. Be sure to check out the show notes. It'll all be there. I'm the host and producer David Evans. And I just like to thank the rest of the team specifically Paul Polman, Lee Burton, and the rest of the aquatic biosphere board. Thanks for all of your help. And to learn more about the aquatic biosphere project. And what we're doing right here in Alberta telling the story of water, you can check us out at aquatic biosphere.ca. And we also have launched our new media company, a b n aquatic biosphere network, which you can find at the public place dot online and search for the aquatic biosphere network channel, where we will actually be posting all of the video episodes that we're going to be creating this year. So tune in. They will be out for the next little while, but very excited to start sharing video content as well of our interviews. If you have any questions or comments about the show, we'd love to hear them. Email us at conservation at a clock biosphere.org. Please don't forget to like, share and subscribe. Leave us a review. It really helps us out. Thanks and it's been a splash