The Atlantic horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus,
is not a crab at all—
more an ancient, armored spider,
here 500 million years.
Choose the right vessel: long and straight.
Choose a good insertion point: key to success.
Tourniquet, swab, stab, advance,
occlude, connect, untie, secure:
the sequence for an intravenous line.
Horseshoe crab blood is blue
from copper in hemocyanin.
Amoebocytes in the blood
detect bacteria in drugs, implants,
electrolyte solutions—anything destined
to enter our bloodstream.
Needle tip in—
backflow of blood
into the cannula barrel—
drop your angle, advance a bit more,
then slide the catheter
smoothly into the vein.
After blood harvest
Horseshoe crabs move less, mate less.
A third will perish.
With fewer horseshoe crab eggs to eat, grackles
and loggerhead turtles waste away; red knots
flying from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle
drop in numbers by the thousands.
There should be a word for the triumph we feel
when we see the flash of red blood
in the barrel. Invasion. Proof.
In hoc signo vinces.
The name Polyphemus—Poseidon’s giant, one-eyed son—
means “abounding in songs and legends”,
but all we’ve done to Limulus polyphemus is use it
for fertilizer, whelk bait, and blood.
60,000 dollars a gallon
for limulus amoebocyte lysate
to test I.V. fluids. We almost never think
of the cost in lives and ecosystems, the martyrs
destroyed to get us here, how entitled we feel
to bleed the world.
In Japan, horseshoe crabs, Tachypleus tridentatus,
are Taira samurai reborn. Male crabs attach themselves
to female mates, and they move around together,
an asymmetric pair encoded into local parlance
as a love ideal, kabutogani-no-chigiri,
horseshoe crab commitment.
We need a word
for the debt we owe
the creatures we exploit,
an unholy grail
stained blue
with our saviors’ blood.
At the far end of the wrack line:
an overturned horseshoe crab,
book gills open to the sky,
chelicerae motionless,
vulnerable as Prometheus
but lifeless and dry
on the sand, worthless
even to ravenous gulls.
