The Nonlinear Library EA - #198 - Challenging our assumptions about insects (Meghan Barrett on The 80,000 Hours Podcast) by 80000 Hours
Aug 29, 2024
23:56
Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: #198 - Challenging our assumptions about insects (Meghan Barrett on The 80,000 Hours Podcast), published by 80000 Hours on August 29, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
We just published an interview: Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects. Listen on Spotify, watch on Youtube, or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
This is a group of animals I think people are particularly unfamiliar with. They are especially poorly covered in our science curriculum; they are especially poorly understood, because people don't spend as much time learning about them at museums; and they're just harder to spend time with in a lot of ways, I think, for people.
So people have pets that are vertebrates that they take care of across the taxonomic groups, and people get familiar with those from going to zoos and watching their behaviours there, and watching nature documentaries and more. But I think the insects are still really underappreciated, and that means that our intuitions are probably more likely to be wrong than with those other groups.
Meghan Barrett
In today's episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Meghan Barrett - insect neurobiologist and physiologist at Indiana University Indianapolis and founding director of the Insect Welfare Research Society - about her work to understand insects' potential capacity for suffering, and what that might mean for how humans currently farm and use insects.
They cover:
The scale of potential insect suffering in the wild, on farms, and in labs.
Examples from cutting-edge insect research, like how depression- and anxiety-like states can be induced in fruit flies and successfully treated with human antidepressants.
How size bias might help explain why many people assume insects can't feel pain.
Practical solutions that Meghan's team is working on to improve farmed insect welfare, such as standard operating procedures for more humane slaughter methods.
Challenges facing the nascent field of insect welfare research, and where the main research gaps are.
Meghan's personal story of how she went from being sceptical of insect pain to working as an insect welfare scientist, and her advice for others who want to improve the lives of insects.
And much more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Highlights
Size diversity
Meghan Barrett: You've seen a lot of insects; you've probably mostly seen small ones. But it turns out that this is not characteristic of the entire group. Insect species vary by a factor of about 5.2 million in body mass from the smallest to the largest.
So to give you some context for that, from a vertebrate perspective, birds are our flying terrestrial vertebrates; insects are our flying terrestrial invertebrates. Birds only vary by a factor of about 72,000 in body mass, whereas in insects, it's 5.2 million.
And so we've got really, really, really tiny insects like parasitic wasps and featherwing beetles that are super, super small - like, on the scale of some cells, single-cell organisms: they're the same size as those, which just also goes to show you how big those can even get. Life is very diverse.
Then we've got these gigantic beetles that if you were to put one on the palm of an adult's hand, would cover from the palm all the way to the fingertips in the longhorn beetles. We've got giant Goliath beetles, we've got huge stick insects - just really, really big insects are also a thing that we have, and people just tend to be less familiar with them.
One example I like to give, again from a vertebrate perspective, where I think we're more fam...
We just published an interview: Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects. Listen on Spotify, watch on Youtube, or click through for other audio options, the transcript, and related links. Below are the episode summary and some key excerpts.
Episode summary
This is a group of animals I think people are particularly unfamiliar with. They are especially poorly covered in our science curriculum; they are especially poorly understood, because people don't spend as much time learning about them at museums; and they're just harder to spend time with in a lot of ways, I think, for people.
So people have pets that are vertebrates that they take care of across the taxonomic groups, and people get familiar with those from going to zoos and watching their behaviours there, and watching nature documentaries and more. But I think the insects are still really underappreciated, and that means that our intuitions are probably more likely to be wrong than with those other groups.
Meghan Barrett
In today's episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Meghan Barrett - insect neurobiologist and physiologist at Indiana University Indianapolis and founding director of the Insect Welfare Research Society - about her work to understand insects' potential capacity for suffering, and what that might mean for how humans currently farm and use insects.
They cover:
The scale of potential insect suffering in the wild, on farms, and in labs.
Examples from cutting-edge insect research, like how depression- and anxiety-like states can be induced in fruit flies and successfully treated with human antidepressants.
How size bias might help explain why many people assume insects can't feel pain.
Practical solutions that Meghan's team is working on to improve farmed insect welfare, such as standard operating procedures for more humane slaughter methods.
Challenges facing the nascent field of insect welfare research, and where the main research gaps are.
Meghan's personal story of how she went from being sceptical of insect pain to working as an insect welfare scientist, and her advice for others who want to improve the lives of insects.
And much more.
Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering by Ben Cordell, Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
Highlights
Size diversity
Meghan Barrett: You've seen a lot of insects; you've probably mostly seen small ones. But it turns out that this is not characteristic of the entire group. Insect species vary by a factor of about 5.2 million in body mass from the smallest to the largest.
So to give you some context for that, from a vertebrate perspective, birds are our flying terrestrial vertebrates; insects are our flying terrestrial invertebrates. Birds only vary by a factor of about 72,000 in body mass, whereas in insects, it's 5.2 million.
And so we've got really, really, really tiny insects like parasitic wasps and featherwing beetles that are super, super small - like, on the scale of some cells, single-cell organisms: they're the same size as those, which just also goes to show you how big those can even get. Life is very diverse.
Then we've got these gigantic beetles that if you were to put one on the palm of an adult's hand, would cover from the palm all the way to the fingertips in the longhorn beetles. We've got giant Goliath beetles, we've got huge stick insects - just really, really big insects are also a thing that we have, and people just tend to be less familiar with them.
One example I like to give, again from a vertebrate perspective, where I think we're more fam...