Invertebrate Welfare — December 2020

As 2020 comes to a close, I want to thank everyone who has been following this newsletter! It has grown a ton over the last year, and I’d like to make it more useful to the people who read it. If you have five minutes, it would be really helpful to me if you could take a brief survey on the content I include in this newsletter, so I can make this as interesting and helpful as possible. Happy New Year!

Insects raised for food and feed

• The FAO has released guidance on sustainable cricket farming.

  • The guidelines were developed in conjunction with a researcher at Thailand’s Khon Kaen University.

    • The researcher, Yupa Hanboonsong, previously worked on Thailand’s agricultural practices guidelines for the 20,000+ Thai cricket farms, which include some animal health provisions, such as hygiene standards for farms to reduce diseases.

  • The new guidelines include several recommendations that directly impact cricket health:

    • “Hygiene needs to be an overriding priority on the farm.” (p. 24)

    • Cleaning pens in between rearing cycles (every 30–45 days).

    • Egg management to avoid inbreeding.

    • Limiting access of people and wildlife to farms to reduce disease entry.

    • Providing footbaths, shoe covers, hair nets, etc. to visitors, to reduce disease entry.

    • Ensuring new cricket stock is healthy.

    • Reducing equipment sharing and visits between cricket farms.

  • Notably, the guidelines don’t make many recommendations on slaughter methods, presumably because the focus is on producing crickets sustainably, and slaughter method has no bearing on that goal.

    • They mention freezing crickets or boiling them for up to 5 minutes to slaughter crickets and sterilize them, but don’t provide further guidance.

      • I believe that freezing may be among the least painful slaughter methods although the data is unclear, but that boiling is almost certainly not. I currently believe rapid shredding of insects is the least painful slaughter method used on farms, though it receives no mention in the FAO guidelines.

  • The guidelines include many useful resources for cricket farmers that overall seem good for cricket welfare, such as worksheets for verifying farm cleanliness, schedules for cleaning pens, and other practical tools.

  • The guidelines include recommendations to cricket farm inspectors, including tools for evaluating the health of crickets. Many of the inspection criteria seem likely to be useful for evaluating the wellbeing of farmed crickets, assuming that low pre-slaughter mortality rates and low disease burden are correlated with wellbeing.

• The journal Food Quality and Preference published a new study on Danish children’s responses to eating foods made with various insect species.

  • The study gave school children oatmeal balls made with different insect products.

  • Overall, children preferred a mealworm version of the food to a grasshopper version.

    • The researchers believe that this is partially due to mealworms seeming less like animals than grasshoppers.

• The North American Coalition for Insect Agriculture held its annual public meeting last month. The slides are available here, and a video of the event is here.

  • The presentation focused on the environmental benefits of insect farming, and in particular feeding food waste to insects.

  • Notably, NACIA continues to work with researchers on developing an NSF-funded Center on Insects as Food and Feed.

    • The center is planning to launch at three US universities, and will spend around $2 million a year initially to promote research to grow the insect farming industry.

  • The coalition continues to focus on getting species-by-species approval from the FDA and Association of American Feed Control Officials for selling insectmeal as animal feed.

    • Slides 31 and 32 in the slideshow linked above include overviews of the current regulatory landscape for insectmeal in the US and Canada, so are especially worth reviewing.

  • The NACIA is also forming a 501(c)6 (business league), partially in order to more effectively lobby their interests to the FDA and other governing bodies.

• Ireland released guidelines on importing and producing insects for feeding wild birds.

  • The guidelines don’t include any specifications that obviously overlap with animal welfare, though there are some insect health requirements.

Bee sentience

• A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that there is significant evidence of individuality in honeybee social behavior

  • The study examined the length of food transfer and face-to-face interactions between pairs of honey bees. 

  • On this metric, high variation (i.e. some pairs of individuals interacting for short periods and others for long periods) is thought to indicate the presence of individuality.

  • While honey bees do not demonstrate as much variation as humans on this measure, the variation was significant, suggesting that bees are not automatons.

• Scientific Reports published a study that found that bumble bees living in landscapes with more abundant flowers had lower pathogen loads.

  • This seems like mild evidence that flower abundance correlates with some aspects of bumble bee welfare (the same is true for my wellbeing).

Miscellaneous

• A new paper published in Remote Sensing Applications: Society and Environment demonstrated a proof of concept for using publicly available satellite images and data to identify shrimp farms.

  • The researchers tested this technique in Thailand, though they emphasize that the methods should be applicable on a global scale. 

• The Entomological Society of America is currently accepting proposals for their 2021 annual meeting.

• In Florida, where Oxitec plans to release genetically modified mosquitoes to curb the local mosquito population, a locally led anti-GMO campaign against the release has grown.

  • Interestingly, there has been little opposition to agricultural applications of Oxitec’s genetically modified insects, such as the Diamondback moth. Oxitec conducted field trials using that insect in 2017.

• Humans are not alone in our efforts to domesticate invertebrates. A study published in Nature Communications reports that damselfish that farm algae have domesticated planktonic shrimp as part of an algae management strategy.

  • Some ants had previously been found to also use domestication-like strategies to manage aphid populations.