The magnitude of the LAL harvest, principally composed of female horseshoe crabs (50%-77%; Rutecki et al., 2004; ASFMC, 2012), has increased 76% since 2006, during which time New England populations of L.
While this population is genetically distinct from the harvested mid-Atlantic populations, the genetic distance is low (King et al., 2005); further, this population has not historically been harvested for biomedical bleeding (ASFMC, 2012), and so animals were presumably neve to the process.