Animal Body Parts Shockingly Great For Human Health

You know those smelly flying saucer crabs that wash up on the beach en masse? Every single injection you've ever had in your entire life was sanitary because of these bizarre creatures.

Yep, horseshoe crabs actually serve a shockingly critical purpose for humans, aside from terrifying you and your loved ones at the beach. The bizarre bright blue blood of a horseshoe crab is basically magic, and essentially how they've survived for the past 450 million years. The blood of a hermit crab is an evolutionary miracle, consisting of impossibly resistant antibiotic qualities and clotting proteins. For one, it has no white blood cells to fight infections, but rather hemocyanin, which is copper-based and can slay infections like we take out the trash.

The medical community has been using horseshoe crab blood since the 1970s to test for contamination, and it could probably save your life too, for its insane ability to clot and avoid bacterial infections. This makes the blood insanely valuable — just one gallon can be worth up to $60,000, making the horseshoe crab blood industry a $50 million a year business. Over 600,000 horseshoe crabs are caught each year to be harvested for blood.

But if we're trapping over half a million of these critters a year, couldn't there be consequences? Yep. Turns out, the population of these blood sacks has been steadily decreasing every year. According to Endangered Species International, the crabs are not yet formally endangered, but threatened, meaning they're on their way to the endangered list if we're not careful. And we better be careful — extinction of the horseshoe crab could ultimately lead to our extinction, due to our no longer being able to use them to test and develop life-saving medicines. So, if you see one washed up at the beach, leave him alone and maybe say thank you. They might be too busy getting eaten by a seagull to acknowledge you, but that's OK. They feel you.