Scientists Have New Sympathy for Crickets. Reptiles Disagree.
· Vice
Maybe you’re like me, and every time you crush an insect, you tell yourself Fine, it probably can’t feel pain anyway. Science has now swooped in with some fresh evidence that will make you feel bad for every cricket you’ve ever fed to your Bearded Dragon, as the research suggests that these little chirping critters that fill our nights with a soothing atmosphere might actually be able to experience something like pain.
According to research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and detailed by The Guardian, scientists at the University of Sydney found that house crickets respond to injury in ways that closely resemble pain-related behavior in more complex animals.
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Researchers tested the insects by touching their antennae with a heated probe hot enough to activate the crickets’ nociceptors, essentially their “harm detectors.” It wasn’t hot enough to do any significant or lasting damage. Just enough to elicit a response.
Instead of jerking away and carrying on with their routine cricket business, the bug repeatedly groomed and protected the injured antenna for the next several minutes. The grooming exclusively favors the harmed side, kind of like a person who rubs the knee that bumped into the dresser.
Pain Is Difficult to Measure, But Crickets Seem to Feel It
It’s a small observation, but an important one, as separating these simple reflexes from regular behaviors suggests a degree of subjective discomfort. Broadly speaking, pain is a difficult thing to measure. Think of those charts depicting a scale of increasingly anguished cartoon faces at doctors’ offices. Everyone’s interpretation of pain is different, and a bunch of emojis in agony are the best we can do to make sense of it all.
When it comes to insects, which were even less expressive than we are (a cricket certainly won’t be telling us how it feels anytime soon), we have to rely on behavioral evidence. Science has been wrestling with the idea of animal sentience and expression of emotional states and physical well-being for a while now.
There are eight criteria associated with pain perception, which include things like wound tending, learning from harmful experiences, and weighing risks over rewards. According to the researchers involved in this study, crickets now meet five of those eight benchmarks, placing them alongside insects like bees, ants, flies, and cockroaches as possessing some level of sentience.
The study doesn’t prove that crickets experience pain the same way we do, but it is just more evidence to add to a growing pile that suggests insects aren’t the emotionless little nothings we tell ourselves they were when we step on them, accidentally or otherwise.
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