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Can Insects Feel Pain? New Research Suggests That Crickets Do
Key takeaways
- Matthew Lindsey via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0 Can crickets feel pain?
- Until now, most research on insect pain has focused on bees, which have been observed grooming their injuries.
- Studying pain is challenging, because it’s a subjective experience.
Matthew Lindsey via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 2.0 Can crickets feel pain? New research suggests these ubiquitous bugs may experience “pain-like” sensations, adding to the growing list of nonhuman species that seem to feel lingering discomfort.
Until now, most research on insect pain has focused on bees, which have been observed grooming their injuries. But this time, scientists decided to focus on house crickets (Acheta domesticus), yellowish-brown bugs that are “reared by the millions for food, feed and research, often under conditions that assume an absence of felt experience,” researchers write in a study published May 13 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“If they’re capable of having better and worse lives, then we should take that into consideration,” study co-author Thomas White, an entomologist at the University of Sydney, in Australia, tells the Guardian’s Petra Stock.