[Animals] Insects Might Feel Pain. Should Scientists Care?

[FazzNoth]

 

Bees have long impressed behavioral scientist Lars Chittka. In his lab at Queen Mary University of London, the pollinators have proved themselves capable of counting, using simple tools, and learning from nest-mates. What really surprises Chittka, however, are the nuances in the insects’ behavior.

In 2008, for instance, a study from Chittka’s lab looked at how bumblebees reacted to a simulated attack by a fake spider on a flower. The bumblebees later approached suspect flowers cautiously and sometimes left even spider-less flowers quickly“as if they were seeing ghosts,” Chittka recalls. By contrast, the bees were seemingly more upbeat after receiving a sugar treat.

 

To Chittka, these observations defy a long-held view that insects are robotlike, controlled by hardwired cognitive programs. Rather, bees’ behavior seems to be influenced by subjective experience a perception of “pleasant” and “unpleasant.” Chittka said he suspects more and more that “there’s quite a rich world inside their minds.”

Early in his career, Chittka never protested when his colleagues opened bees’ skulls and inserted electrodes to study their nervous system. But he now wonders whether such procedures might create “potentially very unpleasant situations” for the insects. Like most invertebrates any animal without an internal skeleton insects tend to be legally unprotected in research. Regulations intended to minimize suffering in vertebrates such as rodents largely don’t apply.

 

Some countries have already improved the welfare of select invertebrates, such as octopuses, squid, crabs, and lobsters. But there’s disagreement over whether other invertebrate species a kaleidoscopically diverse cast of animals also deserve protection. Some scientists believe species with relatively simple brains, such as insects, or perhaps even those with no central nervous system at all also deserve ethical consideration, although the details are under debate.

None of the experts who spoke with Undark argued that research on these invertebrate species should stop. Some organisms, including widely used species of fruit flies or nematode worms, have long led to breakthroughs in genetics, cell development, and other biological processes, and have played important roles in almost a fifth of Nobel Prizes for Physiology or Medicine that were based on animal research. Many scientists are also shifting their research from vertebrates to invertebrates to avoid ethical bureaucracy associated with animal-welfare regulation.

 

Still, recent research is prompting some scientists to rethink traditional research ethics. As Adam Hart, an entomologist at the University of Gloucestershire, puts it, “I think we are at a point where people are willing to entertain the idea that perhaps ethics isn’t just something for animals with backbones.”

The rationale to legally protect animals in scientific research typically rests on their presumed ability to feel pain and suffer one facet of consciousness or sentience. Nearly all animals are capable of physically detecting injuries and displaying reflexes to avoid a threat. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they experience pain, which is not just a sensory experience, but a cognitive, conscious experience of harm and suffering.

 

Establishing that an animal experiences pain is tricky, but there are some behavioral clues that go beyond simple reflexes including coping mechanisms such as nursing wounds and learning from previous injuries. “It’s kind of complicated,” the animal behaviorist Jennifer Mather, of the University of Lethbridge, says. “But we can get a decent idea of whether they have something that we would call pain if it were in us.”

 

Scientists have long observed that vertebrates display behaviors consistent with a conscious experience of pain, such as avoiding situations in which they’ve been harmed or withdrawing from social activity. Legislation to protect vertebrates dates back to at least 1876, when British parliament passed the Cruelty to Animals Act. Today, in many countries, regulations mandate that the use of vertebrates in research be scientifically justified and limits any possible suffering. Standing committees at universities and research institutions typically provide oversight, reviewing research proposals and deciding whether a specific approach is justified.

But invertebrates have historically been deemed incapable of conscious experiences such as pain. The resulting scarcity of regulations means that for most invertebrate species, there’s not much to stop scientists from, say, using large numbers of individuals for a particular experiment, amputating limbs without using anesthetic, keeping them in cramped containers, or dissecting them live. Invertebrates are largely left “open to do whatever you want with them,” Mather says.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/07/insect-invertebrate-pain-research-experiments/671000/