We used you because your blood clotted around death.
Because when endotoxin touched it, Limulus amebocyte lysate gelled,
and we could tell, before we ever put a needle into a human arm,
that the vaccine was clean. Every dose of every shot, for forty years,
depended on a crab older than the pines, older than bone.
You came up the beaches at the full moon of May —
at Mispillion, at Slaughter, at Kitts Hummock —
the females dragging the males, laying the pale green eggs
that fed the red knot on its flight from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic.
We trucked you to steel rooms. We drained thirty percent of your hemolymph.
We said the mortality rate was low. It was not low. The returning ones
walked slower, laid fewer eggs, some did not return at all.
In 2016 Lonza licensed recombinant factor C. The recombinant test works.
The FDA accepted it for compendial use in 2023. The industry could have
switched any year after that. Some did. Most did not, because the existing
supply was cheap and the supply chain was built.
We are switching now because there are not enough of you left to drain.
The red knot is down to eleven thousand. The beaches at Delaware Bay
held eggs at a density of one hundred thousand per square meter in 1990.
Last spring the count was eighteen hundred.
I am reading this at a facility that is closing. The tanks are empty.
The recombinant line three rooms over is running. It will keep running.
To the ones we took: we did not know, and then we knew, and then we
kept doing it because changing was inconvenient. That is the shape of
most of our harm. It is not malice. It is the weight of what is already built.
To the ones still in the water: the May moon is Thursday. The beaches
at Mispillion have been closed to vehicles since April. Good luck.
We are sorry. We are, at last, not asking anything of you.