Invertebrate Welfare — October 2020
Insect sentience
Jason Schukraft published new research concerning how we might expect the intensity of valenced experiences to differ across species.
Knowing how intense experiences are between different species might help us prioritize interventions to reduce animal suffering.
Notably, invertebrates are sometimes claimed to be of lower moral status, potentially in part due to having less intense experiences.
Schukraft notes, “The motivation for this view seems to be the idea that the intensity of an animal’s valenced experience should scale with the complexity of the animal’s nervous system. However, it’s hard to square this idea with the evolutionary function of valenced experience. It's unclear what fitness advantage the palest hint of a feeling could convey. Pain motivates animals to do things like avoid bodily damage; pleasure motivates animals to do things like reproduce. Subjective experiences so faint as to barely register would do a poor job motivating anything.”
Schukraft also lists areas for further research.
On Netflix, a new documentary called My Octopus Teacher explores a friendship between a human and a common octopus off the coast of South Africa.
The film documents the octopus engaging in complex behaviors, such as playing with schools of fish, and building complex defences against sharks.
Research on octopi is growing in popularity in labs, and octopi used for food may soon be raised on farms for the first time.
A study has found that pesticides and resource stressors in agricultural areas are directly impacting bee reproduction.
Invertebrate farming
Hundreds of millions of dollars invested into invertebrate farming.
This month, major investments into invertebrate farming likely positioned several companies for substantial growth in the near future.
Ÿnsect, a mealworm producer developing alternatives to fishmeal and grain for animal feed raised 372 million dollars in a new funding round, positioning it for a major expansion over the next decade.
Entocycle, a UK-based black soldier fly producer, won a 10 million pound grant from the UK government to lead a coalition of insect producers through an expansion of food waste fed fly larvae production as a novel animal feed.
Relatedly, Business Insider covered InsectiPro, which is expanding its capacity to grow black soldier flies on food waste in Nairobi, Kenya.
These investments are, as far as I can tell, the largest ever in the insect farming space.
The Ÿnsect investment alone is over 3 times the value of the entire edible insect market in 2019.
The Financial Times is now regularly covering insect farming, with three articles in the last month alone on these and other investments.
Insect product alternatives
A Berkeley startup, MeliBio, is developing a microbial fermentation based honey alternative.
Alternative honeys, in the form of honey-flavored syrups, have been made for years (such as products by the Vegan Honey Company, and the now defunct Bee Free Honee).
Biological control
Oxitec, a British company that is currently testing genetically modified mosquitoes in Florida and Brazil, is now testing genetically modified armyworms, which are a common target of agricultural insecticides, and which cause billions of dollars of agricultural damage annually, particularly in West Africa.
The population-limiting effects for the armyworms come from the same methodology used for the mosquitoes in Florida: by releasing males who will not produce viable offspring to overwhelm the local population.
Although the genetic modification is new, sterile insect technique has existed for decades, and been used to eradicate pest populations without chemicals before in the case of the screwworm.
If successful, this project could cause a reduction in pesticide use of corn and rice crops in West Africa. The ecological and animal welfare impacts of this change is unclear, but it might be reasonable to assume that population control approaches that target fertility would be less painful than those using lethal methods, and if successful, possibly would result in fewer overall deaths.
Oxitec also released a public awareness website for their mosquito reduction project in the Florida Keys.
Miscellaneous
After a fly was the most notable part of the 2020 US vice presidential debate, the Biden campaign released a fly swatter. PETA responded by mailing a non-lethal fly trap to the campaign.
A new article in Nature Communications found that crickets evolved the ability to chirp around 300 million years ago.
Microorganisms published a study which found that an extract from fly larvae may have the ability to replace some antibiotics that are used to address plant pathogens.