A new study suggests bees feel pain, a possible clue that they and other insects have sentience—the ability to be aware of their feelings.
Chittka’s team gave 41 bumble bees a choice between two high-quality feeders containing a 40% sugar solution and two feeders with lower percentages of sucrose. The researchers placed the feeders in a testing arena on top of individual heating pads colored pink or yellow. Initially, all the heating pads were turned off; the bees entered the arena one at a time and sampled the feeders. They had to sip from each one to detect the amount of sugar. All preferred the feeders with the most sugar.
The scientists then warmed up the yellow pads beneath two of the high sucrose feeders to 55°C ; feeders on the pink pads stayed cool. For a bee, landing on a hot yellow pad would be like us “touching a hot plate,” says lead author Matilda Rose Gibbons, a behavioral neuroscientist and Ph.D. student in Chittka’s lab. But bees that could withstand the pain would also get more sugar., the scientists report today in the.
Besides crustaceans, “This is the first direct demonstration that arthropods”—a group that also includes insects and spiders—“can also do trade-offs,” Birch says. He calls the study “intellectually fascinating” and “ethically important,” given growing interest in farming insects for human consumption—and the complete lack of “research into the welfare needs of insects.”
Still, it remains unclear whether bees really feel what we call pain; the scientists point out that their study does not provide “formal proof” of this ability. Given its subjective nature, “proving that insects feel pain is probably impossible,” says Greg Neely, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Sydney. He has shown, but he doubts that insects have the neurological systems to allow pain to register as a complex emotion.
Definitively proving insects mentally feel pain probably isn’t possible, agrees Jennifer Mather, a zoologist and cephalopod expert at the University of Lethbridge whose studies helped prove those animals are sentient. Nevertheless, given that insects represent at least 60% of all animals, she says, “We can’t ignore them. There is still anthropocentrism in Western science that rejects the idea of caring about ‘dumb invertebrates.
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