Insects' Astounding Abilities & Diversity

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Insects showcase remarkable abilities such as treating wounded kin with antibiotics, engaging in tool use, offering gifts to one another, singing songs, and demonstrating facial recognition skills. They can also make advanced cognitive leaps like transit inference, showing their intellectual capabilities. With over 5.5 million species, insects present a vast and diverse group, making it challenging to generalize their traits. This diversity highlights the complexity and depth of these organisms, urging us to reconsider our perceptions. Despite their intelligence, the key question remains whether insects can experience suffering.

Bob Fischer is the Senior Research Manager at Rethink Priorities and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University.

Can insects feel pain? Should people who care about chickens, cows and pigs also care about reducing the suffering of crickets or black soldier flies? In this episode with Bob Fischer from Rethink Priorities, we try to answer some of those questions, as well as talking about the rapidly growing insect industry, and possible ways for advocates to help farmed insects.

We talk about lots of interesting content and research, for some of which there are excellent visualisations, which we’ll link to at the top of the show notes. I highly recommend checking out the Welfare Range Table and Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range estimates to help better understand some of the points here, both of which are linked.

Bob also had a great conversation on the 80,000 Hours Podcast about the moral weights project more broadly and how they want to try to compare welfare across different species of animals. We think they covered it very well, so we didn’t speak much about it today, so we’ll link it for interested folks.

Relevant links to things mentioned throughout the show:

Cognitive and hedonic proxies of different animals from Rethink Priorities Moral Weights Project
Rethink Priorities’ Welfare Range estimates
- For more on this, listen to Bob’s great episode on the 80,000 Hours podcast
Research paper, “Can Insects Feel Pain?”, which found that two orders of insects (which include cockroaches, termites, flies and mosquitos) met more criteria to feel pain than decapod crustaceans (e.g. crabs, lobsters, shrimp), which are recognised as sentient by the UK government.
How I Learned To Love Shrimp YouTube Channel
Meghan Barrett’s handbook chapter
Barn 8 by Deb Olin Unferth
Dominion by Matthew Scully
Donate to Insect Welfare Research Society
Donate to Rethink Priorities
Newsletter for Insect Welfare Research Society
Newsletter for Rethink Priorities

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