THE DAILY WIRE · DELAWARE · 2026-10-30
Four Hundred Million Years and Still Billing by the Quart
The National Zoo has released ten facts about horseshoe crabs, and this reporter is obligated to note that one of them involves blood so valuable it is effectively currency. The species has outlasted dinosaurs, three mass extinctions, and apparently every trend cycle known to evolution.
The fact sheet covers the basics any serious crab-watcher already knew: horseshoe crabs are not true crabs at all but closer relatives of spiders and scorpions, their copper-based blood runs blue, and that blood is harvested for pharmaceutical safety testing because it detects bacterial contamination with unnerving precision.
Webster will admit a professional courtesy toward a fellow arachnid relative and will resist, against every instinct, making more than one web-related pun about this. The crabs gather on beaches in mass spawning events each spring, a logistics operation this desk can only describe as impressive.
Seeking an informed local take, this reporter located Deputy Marsh, a Delaware Bay gull who has spent every spring along the spawning beaches doing what he describes as 'quality control.' His perspective on the crabs' value differs sharply from the zoo's clinical fact sheet.
The zoo frames this as education. Webster frames it as a 450-million-year-old animal quietly being worth more per ounce than most publicly traded companies. Spun and done.
“I've eaten more horseshoe crab eggs than that zoo's got pamphlets, and the blue blood thing is absolutely true, I've seen the stains on the sand every spring. Humans turned a 450-million-year-old bug into a pharmacy, which tracks, they do that to everything useful.” — Deputy Marsh, Delaware Bay gull
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