Invertebrate Welfare — February 2020

Written By Abraham Rowe

Project Updates

Currently, I’m working on two separate invertebrate welfare related projects. The first is building a website that will serve as an information hub on industries that impact insects, and a record of research that has been completed in the space.

Secondly, I’ve begun diving into the insect protein space. I’ve started with a survey of cricket, mealworm, and black soldier fly farms in the US and Canada, along with some interviews with insect farmers and industry consultants. I hope to publish this research in the coming months.

This is a new newsletter, and I haven’t landed on the right way to format it yet — if you have any suggestions, please let me know!


Invertebrate Industry News

50 million locusts

  • In Pakistan, massive locust swarms are threatening crops and the state has responded through aerial application of pesticides. Some researchers have advocated incentivizing communities to catch and eat locusts as food as an alternative to pesticide application. In May 2019, according to one source, this approach was successfully used in Yemen to eradicate a swarm of 50 million locusts. The AP released a video showing locust vendors in Yemen following this effort. It’s unclear if this control approach is effective. I haven’t found any information on how the locusts are killed.

4.33 billion sea lice

  • 20% of farmed salmon die due to parasites. The most common of these are sea lice. Sea lice are unrelated to the insect lice common in human and farmed animal populations. They are a family of copepods (a small crustacean). Apparently, the treatment for sea lice is extremely harsh — 10% to 15% of the salmon deaths from parasites are due to the stress of sea lice treatment, while only 5% are due to the sea lice themselves. Chemical applications could be very bad for both sea louse and fish welfare.

    • A new intervention is the specialized application of electrical pulses, which have been found to kill 60% to 80% of sea lice larvae, leading to a dramatic reduction in infestations.

    • Researchers have also begun developing drugs to treat sea lice.

    • Somewhere between 10% and 30% of wild salmon also die due to sea lice infestations.

    • A rough back-of-the-envelope estimate of scale: average sea lice infestation seems to be between 0.2 and 5 lice per salmon, or an average of about 3 lice per salmon across all Atlantic farmed salmon. 2 million tonnes of farmed Atlantic salmon (gutted weight) were harvested in 2017. Average gutted weight of Atlantic Salmon is 2.89 kg. This suggests that annually, almost 700 million Atlantic salmon are harvested. With around 20% die off from parasites prior to harvesting (the rate in both Scotland and Norway), this means at least 865 million Atlantic salmon are raised on farms annually, which suggests that somewhere between 173 million and 4.33 billion sea lice are killed on farms every year using chemical treatments, along with ~120 million salmon, while another ~45 million farmed salmon die due to sea lice infestations. This number does not include the sea lice who live on wild salmon.

  • The salmon farming industry seems extremely concerned about sea lice, and is actively working on new methods to reduce infestation rates.

Feeding insects to farmed animals

  • The most concerning trend in the invertebrate farming industry is a spate of new businesses aiming to replace animal feed with insects. If these farmers are successful at producing an extremely cheap nutritious feed, insect farming might grow rapidly. This would lead to fewer concerns about consumer uptake (due to disgust) in the West, and the insect industry is rapidly growing in Africa and Asia. In Asia in particular, there is already large scale insect farming and the largest farmed animal population in the world. In February, Feed Navigator even covered the topic — reviewing a study on feeding black soldier flies to farmed catfish.

  • Additionally, a study was just released which found that feeding black soldier fly larvae to laying hens may actually improve hen welfare by improving the feather condition of birds. Given the current push for improved laying hen welfare in the farmed animal advocacy sector, this could be a concerning development. The article was also covered in Feed Navigator.

Genetically engineered moths released into the wild

  • The first ever genetically engineered moths have been released into the wild in New York state. The moths have two genes added — one that causes female offspring to die rapidly (it is unclear how), and another that marks the moth to track the genes. This is similar to the sterile insect technique that has been in use for decades, and was found to be effective in reducing the population of diamondback moths, a common agricultural pest.

Invertebrate sentience news

  • National Geographic covered a debate over whether or not octoculture is ethical. Since most octopi are harvested from the wild, farming is relatively novel. But growing demand for octopi is driving increased interest. Also of note — some octopi farms are growing zooplankton to feed octopi, potentially compounding the welfare consequences.

  • A study, published in Science, claims to have collected evidence that bumblebees have cross-modal object recognition. The bees were trained to discriminate between small cubes and spheres using only touch (e.g. in the dark), or vision (in the light, unable to touch them). They collected evidence that the bees were able to identify the objects following this training using only the other sense (e.g. if a bee was trained to identify based on touch, it could identify the same objects later using only sight). This may be evidence in favor of bee sentience.


Oddities and lesser notes

Abraham Rowe
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Invertebrate Welfare — March 2020