Horseshoe crabs have been pharmaceutical companies’ best friends. Their turquoise-blue blood is incredibly sensitive to bacteria, and these companies bleed out hundreds of thousands of horseshoe crabs every year to test their medicines for impurities and contamination. Our medicinal vampirism is causing these historical species to lose numbers unsustainably. In 1992, an alternative to horseshoe crab blood called recombinant Factor C (rFC) was created. It is just as effective and produces even more reliable results. Many U.S. companies are not using it because the U.S. Pharmacopeia has not deemed rFCs as an equivalent replacement of this blood. This means that companies must go through a lot more testing in order to use rFCs, making them a lot more inaccessible. If the US Pharmacopeia announces that rFCs are an equivalent to the horseshoe crab blood, we could be saving a huge part of our global ecosystem. It is so important now more than ever to help preserve species, especially ones such as horseshoe crabs that have existed even before dinosaurs have to preserve our global ecosystem.