Life Sciences Commons^™

The Horseshoe Crab Conundrum: Can We Harvest And Conserve?, Jennifer Mattei, Mark Beekey

Biology Faculty Publications

Horeshoe crabs "Limulus polyphemus" are remarkable ‘living fossils’ which have unique blood cells (amebocytes) that are used to test human vaccines for bacterial contamination. In the 1950’s, scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, not only discovered amebocytes but also found that they had special properties. If the amebocytes came into contact with bacteria, they would instantly coagulate around the bacteria and attack it. The Woods Hole scientists took this unique property of horseshoe crabs and developed a test for bacterial contamination using a horseshoe crab blood derivative called Limulus Amebocyte Lysate (LAL).

This article describes discusses …

The Charisma Of Coastal Ecosystems: Addressing The Imbalance, Carlos M. Duarte, Wc Dennison, Robert J. Orth, Tim J. Carruthers

VIMS Articles

Coastal ecosystems including coral reefs, mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and salt marshes are being lost at alarming rates, and increased scientific understanding of causes has failed to stem these losses. Coastal habitats receive contrasting research effort, with 60% of all of the published research carried out on coral reefs, compared to 11–14% of the records for each of salt marshes, mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows. In addition, these highly connected and interdependent coastal ecosystems receive widely contrasting media attention that is disproportional to their scientific attention. Seagrass ecosystems receive the least attention in the media (1.3% of the media reports) …