Even insects experience joys and sorrows

They fly, jump, crawl, walk. In the air, underground, on water. Until recently, insects were thought of as automatons, numb and thoughtless. Today some research subverts this assumption, arguing that some species, and perhaps all, are sentient.

Signs of intelligence

First of all, it seems that many insects are intelligent. The bees, for example, they are able to count, grasp the concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks, perceive their own body size. Someone wasps they recognize their nest mates and display amazing social skills. They can, for example, infer the strength of their fellows relative to their own simply by observing them in combat. And again, the ants manage to save the anthill companions buried under the rubble, while the flies immersed in virtual reality they show attention and awareness of the passage of time.

The joy of the game

In addition to cognitive skills, there would then be emotional skills. Some studies suggest that the bees they can experience optimism and even joy. “Recently this idea was corroborated by an experiment,” he explained Lars Chittka, professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary University of London, in Scientific American. “We have connected a colony of bumblebees to an area with moving balls on one side and an area with stationary balls on the other. In between was a clear path that led to a feeding area containing sugar solution and pollen. Well, the bees have returned many times and remained for extended periods of time in the play area where they could roll the moving balls, even though plenty of food was provided nearby. There seemed to be something intrinsically pleasurable about the activity itself.”

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The discomfort of bees, cockroaches, midges

But the more relevant and controversial question is whether bees and other insects are capable of feeling pain. A topic that Chittka and his team have long investigated. “In one experiment, we presented bees with two groups of artificial flowers: one heated to 55 degrees, the other at room temperature,” says the teacher. “We, therefore, varied the rewards for visiting flowers, observing that bees avoided heat when the rewards for both flower groups were equal, while choosing to land on heated petals and buds when the relative reward was high. These hymenoptera they therefore demonstrated flexibility, managing to establish when it was worth enduring the discomfort. Even when the warmth and reward were removed, the bees could memorize the pros and cons of each group of flowers.”

Chittka’s analyzes went beyond bees, highlighting “reasonably strong evidence for the ability of a number of insects, including cockroaches and fruit fliesto feel pain.”

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Ethical obligations

From all this arise some important ethical implications. In everyday life, for example: when you can’t help but eliminate an annoying insect, like a mosquito, you should always make sure that death is instantaneous and painless. But also in scientific laboratories, where anesthesia should be introduced for the most invasive procedures and the number of insects tested or sacrificed should be reduced, ensuring that the severity of the treatments is proportional to the acquisition of knowledge. And again, infeed industry, where more than a trillion crickets, black soldier flies, mealworms and other species are killed each year, often by inappropriate methods, such as baking, boiling, or microwaving, which can cause intense suffering. All this to feed them to animals bred for human consumption, such as the salmon or the chickendestined, in turn, for a bloody end.

“It is possible that some species, in certain larval stages, have a lower capacity to suffer, but, until we have definitive evidence, we will have to proceed with the utmost caution,” says Chittka.

The poison of pesticides

Finally, the problem of pesticides, which are distributed by the ton on leaves, roots, vegetables, fruits, to produce low-cost food with maximum profit. These substances poison and kill numerous insects, such as grasshoppers, cicadas, butterflies, often with slow and painful processes, which last several days. Also well documented are the harmful effects of insecticides known as neonicotinoids, which negatively influence learning, movement and reproduction of bees.