(highlight:: Insects' Astounding Abilities & Diversity
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I do think it's pretty easy to underestimate what's going on in insects. And we're often just really short-sighted in terms of the way we think about them as animals. There are a zillion examples that we could come up with. So things of when ants get into battles with termites, they'll take their wounded kin back to the nest. And they'll actually apply this antibiotics creation to help them heal faster. And there are a million cases of tool use. And then there are evidence of giving gifts to one another. And they even have songs. And there are little wasps that have facial recognition abilities and can each identify every other one in the hive based on the distinct markings on their faces. And then, of course, there are the kinds of things that are not that exciting to describe abstractly, but are actually pretty impressive, like the ability to engage in transit inference. They can say, oh, well, if A then B and B then C. So if A then C, they can make that inferential step. Which insects can do that? Or is that pretty broad at Monksen? The problem with all of these cases, something about wasps where that particular study was done, the problem with all of this is that we're talking about like 5.5 million species. So when I talk about insects, I'm talking about this incredibly large, diverse group of organisms. We can sort of go and find very cool traits across all that diversity as you would expect. And it makes it really difficult to know exactly when you can generalize and when you can't. So we don't want to suggest the same things are true of every species. At the same time, the diversity and range should make us think, okay, probably a lot more going on here than we may have appreciated to begin with. The other crucial piece is to remember that as smart as many insects and backed are, as much as we're underestimating their abilities, the real question is whether they can suffer.)
- Time 0:07:40
-

(highlight:: Some Insects Serve as Good Pain Models for Studying Human Pain
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And for me, I think one of the most compelling lines of evidence is just how useful some insects have proven to be as pain models for studying human pain. The striking thing about this is you'll keep finding these researchers in all these papers saying, oh, isn't it great that this neurological system is so similar to what we find in humans. It makes it so valuable for studying these farm out of pain and you think, well, that is a really striking claim to make when you're like, you're doing all of these terrible things with These insects. But it does help you think about the fact that it's not just there's some particular behaviors that you might notice and think, oh, well, that could be the evidence of pain. It's that actually when you're getting down to the neurophysiological traits, they are useful for understanding human pain, which is highly suggestive.)
- Time 0:09:54
-

(highlight:: Insects May Not Feel Pain in The Same Ways We Do
Transcript:
Speaker 1
People make a big deal out of these behavioral phenomena, and they wanna say things like, oh well, you know, mantises will allow themselves to be eaten, and so they must not, you know, Not possible that they're experiencing pain, and never think about, like first of all, the fact that some mantises do actually fight back to the death, because they don't wanna get Eaten, so I can just not universally true, but also that like different life histories are gonna have very different kinds of behavioral responses being appropriate, and depending On what your body's made of, and whether it heals in a certain way, it might not make sense to protect certain kinds of limbs, and so people focus on like mechanical damage, oh well, you Know, you can rip the leg off of this thing, and it will keep moving as opposed to thinking, oh, but you know what, it really doesn't like being burnt, it doesn't like high temperatures, Or doesn't like electric shocks. Yeah, you do actually get exactly the responses you would expect from an organism experiencing pain, just not from this other thing that you, you know, might've thought was a big deal, If what your model of an insect is, a tiny little mammal, so like once you get away from that set of assumptions about what you're dealing with, you really can think very differently about What the evidence should look like, and what it would mean to assess this stuff well.)
- Time 0:15:18
-

(highlight:: Imagine if Bumblebees Were As Rare and As Big As Rhinos
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Imagine that insects were rare, harmless, and really large, right? Imagine that the only insect out there was the Bumblebee, and it was as big as a rhino, and they only lived in Ghana, and they didn't hurt anybody. You would love Bumblebees, right? It would be your favorite, right? Everybody would be super invested in the preservation of Bumblebees, and I think the same is true if you imagine them as termites or whatever else. And I think that shows us something about how we're not really responding to them as individuals, we're responding to other factors, a sense of dispensability, a sense of insignificance, Simply in virtue of size, and a threat vector, that these are the kinds of things that can harm us. And that combination of factors makes it very hard to sympathize with insects.)
- Time 0:18:57
-

(highlight:: Size Bias and Insects: Insects Exhibit Mammal Behaviors & Were Larger In Prehistoric Times
Transcript:
Speaker 2
On the size bias question, I guess I totally agree that we probably do have some bias, but I also think, isn't that somewhat justified because surely smaller animals have smaller brains, Therefore less ability to feel and think of a complex emotion, so isn't some size bias justified?
Speaker 1
There are a few things to say about that. One is that, you know, what's the evidence for that correlation? Actually, as we were talking about earlier, you're gonna see all the kinds of traits that you might find really appealing in much, much larger animals in insects. So do you want, you know, an example of monogamous parental care for life? Oh, yeah, there's an insect species that does that, you know? Do you want an example of like memory of some kind that appears to like exist throughout the lifespan, right? So like long-term retention of information? Oh yeah, we've got, you know, that an insect. In fact, sometimes even through metamorphosis, right? Which is really wild to think that information can be preserved across that kind of transition. You know, are you looking for social learning? We seem to have that in insects. So it was actually just a great paper that came out about that recently. So it might be the case that if size really tracked those traits, and we could say, oh yeah, you find less of these interesting behaviors and, you know, less sophisticated cognition As size decreases, then it would be a good heuristic. But I think it just, as a matter of fact, isn't. And another way of appreciating that is by recognizing that there also have been these huge shifts in evolutionary history, right? So insects used to be really huge back in the Cretaceous period, right? And so what happened was over time, various forces resulted in the shrinking of their body sizes. It doesn't necessarily mean that they lost all these interesting traits and behaviors. So even if there was like, it's one point size was a useful heuristic, where maybe you needed that at some point in evolutionary time, which I'm not saying is true, but even if it were true, It would be important to remember that actually that wouldn't always help us think about the organisms we're dealing with in the present.)
- Time 0:19:46
-

(highlight:: Sustainable Protein: The Rise of Insects in Animal Feed
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The big issue here is, you know, how did this conversation get started? Where did, how do we end up chatting about this topic in the first place? So the main way to think about this is there is a big change happening in the human demand for protein. There's expectation that by 2050, you're gonna get 70% more demand. And you've got a, that's driven by population increase plus a rising middle class that wants more animal-based foods. Then the question is, how are you going to feed the animals? People wanna eat? And the basic story about that is you can feed them, you know, either stuff we grow or stuff that we're catching from the oceans, you know, one of those two things, we are just running into Sustainability problems on both fronts, right? We're running out of fish to harvest for fish meal, and we're at the same time having problems with, you know, clearing deforestation to grow more soy to provide more protein. And so in that context, insects look like this very attractive solution because they can recycle waste. And so people are thinking, hey, we want the sort of circular system where the waste streams from all these other forms of food production are repurposed and converted into a high quality Product that can provide a high quality protein to the animals who humans wanna eat. In particular, fish, so farm fish and shrimp are actually the biggest applications right now. It's the easiest applications, it's where the most of the money is. But then, you know, potentially other kinds of animals. So, you know, I've got a colleague at Texas State who does work on black soldier fly as cattle feed. People are looking for any way that they can, they can use these insects and monetize them. So that's where the industry's coming from. That's what's driving the interest in it. There has been significant capital investment in the insects' food and feed industry over the last several years. And the challenge is to see if you can scale, to see if you can find ways of making this a sustainable enterprise. And of course, that's the thing that's going to create all the kinds of welfare concerns that we're familiar with from other industries, right? So it's one thing when Aunt Jenny is growing some mealworms in her shed so that she can feed them to, you know, her pet lizard or whatever. And it's a very different thing when you're talking about these facilities that might be rearing, you know, hundreds of millions, billions, potentially a trillion insects in a year. Now we're dealing with economies of scale from the producer side, but we're dealing with potentially enormous amounts of harm from an advocacy perspective and from a well-towered Perspective. As you want to look at the kinds of questions that are going to come up when you're raising animals at mass scale of this type.)
- Time 0:26:10
-

(highlight:: Different Ways of Slaughtering Insects and Their Welfare Implications
Transcript:
Speaker 2
One thing that a welfare issue that I do find quite striking in the insect case is I think Megan mentioned this in her talk, which we'll link below as well as the summary of the research Paper and some of your work on the welfare range table is the way some of these insects kill the things black soil deflies. They're actually either like microwave or put in an oven until they basically like die from like almost exploding, which it seems like that was like very best for like, wow, this is an Unbelievable way to kill animals. And you know more about that, am I remembering broadly correctly?
Speaker 1
So what's going on there is, you know, depending on the use of the insect, they are gonna be very different processing strategies. So sometimes you can grind them if you're, you know, depending on the way that you wanna use them. Sometimes though you're gonna wanna boil them. Sometimes you're gonna wanna flash freeze them. Sometimes you're gonna wanna, you know, microwave. Sometimes you're gonna wanna use ovens, et cetera, et cetera. And these are all depending on the intended outcome, what you hope the product will end up becoming. And of course, some of those ways of killing are really fast or at least relatively fast. So there's work on like how to speed up the, you know, the rate of killing when you're grinding. And so we can get that, you know, with some modifications down to a relatively quick slaughter rate. Some of these things are just inherently slow because that's what's required to desiccate the animal if that's the kind of product that you're looking for. And that just of course is gonna take, you know, minimally minutes to kill those animals. So if we think about, you know, how quick slaughter is now for terrestrial vertebrates, you know, we actually, it's still bad, but we've gotten the time to death down considerably and We're just not anywhere close to that on the insect trunk.)
- Time 0:33:35
-

(highlight:: Challenging Public Perception of Animal Welfare in the Feed Industry
Summary:
The challenge lies in getting the public to be concerned about the welfare standards of animals that are made into feed for the animals they consume.
This poses a significant obstacle in advocating for better welfare standards, especially when considering perceptions and comfort levels regarding insects as a feed source. Despite the industry being values-driven, public support may not be a central aspect of the current conversation.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
This is really gonna be an issue at the heart of the industry and something that I was just thinking there is challenge with getting the public to be concerned about the welfare standards Of the animals that they actually consume. So chickens, pigs, cows, fish. And now we're asking them to care about the welfare of animals that are made into feed for the animal that they're going to consume. And so it seems like such a giant leak further backwards than the kind of advocacy that we're working on right now that those approaches in the way that we tackle the industry is gonna Be really integral as to how successful challenging those welfare issues are going to be because that public angle is just seems at the moment kind of impossible.
Speaker 1
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker 3
You know, it's a tough road.
Speaker 1
I mean, it's a tough road. And I think it's especially difficult in the case of insects just because, again, how comfortable people feel, thinking about them as dispensable, et cetera, how little people are Inclined to distinguish them from plants, the way that they are almost not fully categorized as animals. So yeah, these are just really hard problems. I'm not thinking about public support as particularly central at this stage to the conversation. There are a few things to say. One is though these are producers are indeed, you know, ultimately committed to building this industry and becoming really successful at doing it, it's a values-driven industry.)
- Time 0:37:57
-

(highlight:: Insects' Astounding Abilities & Diversity
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I do think it's pretty easy to underestimate what's going on in insects. And we're often just really short-sighted in terms of the way we think about them as animals. There are a zillion examples that we could come up with. So things of when ants get into battles with termites, they'll take their wounded kin back to the nest. And they'll actually apply this antibiotics creation to help them heal faster. And there are a million cases of tool use. And then there are evidence of giving gifts to one another. And they even have songs. And there are little wasps that have facial recognition abilities and can each identify every other one in the hive based on the distinct markings on their faces. And then, of course, there are the kinds of things that are not that exciting to describe abstractly, but are actually pretty impressive, like the ability to engage in transit inference. They can say, oh, well, if A then B and B then C. So if A then C, they can make that inferential step. Which insects can do that? Or is that pretty broad at Monksen? The problem with all of these cases, something about wasps where that particular study was done, the problem with all of this is that we're talking about like 5.5 million species. So when I talk about insects, I'm talking about this incredibly large, diverse group of organisms. We can sort of go and find very cool traits across all that diversity as you would expect. And it makes it really difficult to know exactly when you can generalize and when you can't. So we don't want to suggest the same things are true of every species. At the same time, the diversity and range should make us think, okay, probably a lot more going on here than we may have appreciated to begin with. The other crucial piece is to remember that as smart as many insects and backed are, as much as we're underestimating their abilities, the real question is whether they can suffer.)
- Time 0:07:40
-

(highlight:: Some Insects Serve as Good Pain Models for Studying Human Pain
Transcript:
Speaker 1
And for me, I think one of the most compelling lines of evidence is just how useful some insects have proven to be as pain models for studying human pain. The striking thing about this is you'll keep finding these researchers in all these papers saying, oh, isn't it great that this neurological system is so similar to what we find in humans. It makes it so valuable for studying these farm out of pain and you think, well, that is a really striking claim to make when you're like, you're doing all of these terrible things with These insects. But it does help you think about the fact that it's not just there's some particular behaviors that you might notice and think, oh, well, that could be the evidence of pain. It's that actually when you're getting down to the neurophysiological traits, they are useful for understanding human pain, which is highly suggestive.)
- Time 0:09:54
-

(highlight:: Insects May Not Feel Pain in The Same Ways We Do
Transcript:
Speaker 1
People make a big deal out of these behavioral phenomena, and they wanna say things like, oh well, you know, mantises will allow themselves to be eaten, and so they must not, you know, Not possible that they're experiencing pain, and never think about, like first of all, the fact that some mantises do actually fight back to the death, because they don't wanna get Eaten, so I can just not universally true, but also that like different life histories are gonna have very different kinds of behavioral responses being appropriate, and depending On what your body's made of, and whether it heals in a certain way, it might not make sense to protect certain kinds of limbs, and so people focus on like mechanical damage, oh well, you Know, you can rip the leg off of this thing, and it will keep moving as opposed to thinking, oh, but you know what, it really doesn't like being burnt, it doesn't like high temperatures, Or doesn't like electric shocks. Yeah, you do actually get exactly the responses you would expect from an organism experiencing pain, just not from this other thing that you, you know, might've thought was a big deal, If what your model of an insect is, a tiny little mammal, so like once you get away from that set of assumptions about what you're dealing with, you really can think very differently about What the evidence should look like, and what it would mean to assess this stuff well.)
- Time 0:15:18
-

(highlight:: Imagine if Bumblebees Were As Rare and As Big As Rhinos
Transcript:
Speaker 1
Imagine that insects were rare, harmless, and really large, right? Imagine that the only insect out there was the Bumblebee, and it was as big as a rhino, and they only lived in Ghana, and they didn't hurt anybody. You would love Bumblebees, right? It would be your favorite, right? Everybody would be super invested in the preservation of Bumblebees, and I think the same is true if you imagine them as termites or whatever else. And I think that shows us something about how we're not really responding to them as individuals, we're responding to other factors, a sense of dispensability, a sense of insignificance, Simply in virtue of size, and a threat vector, that these are the kinds of things that can harm us. And that combination of factors makes it very hard to sympathize with insects.)
- Time 0:18:57
-

(highlight:: Size Bias and Insects: Insects Exhibit Mammal Behaviors & Were Larger In Prehistoric Times
Transcript:
Speaker 2
On the size bias question, I guess I totally agree that we probably do have some bias, but I also think, isn't that somewhat justified because surely smaller animals have smaller brains, Therefore less ability to feel and think of a complex emotion, so isn't some size bias justified?
Speaker 1
There are a few things to say about that. One is that, you know, what's the evidence for that correlation? Actually, as we were talking about earlier, you're gonna see all the kinds of traits that you might find really appealing in much, much larger animals in insects. So do you want, you know, an example of monogamous parental care for life? Oh, yeah, there's an insect species that does that, you know? Do you want an example of like memory of some kind that appears to like exist throughout the lifespan, right? So like long-term retention of information? Oh yeah, we've got, you know, that an insect. In fact, sometimes even through metamorphosis, right? Which is really wild to think that information can be preserved across that kind of transition. You know, are you looking for social learning? We seem to have that in insects. So it was actually just a great paper that came out about that recently. So it might be the case that if size really tracked those traits, and we could say, oh yeah, you find less of these interesting behaviors and, you know, less sophisticated cognition As size decreases, then it would be a good heuristic. But I think it just, as a matter of fact, isn't. And another way of appreciating that is by recognizing that there also have been these huge shifts in evolutionary history, right? So insects used to be really huge back in the Cretaceous period, right? And so what happened was over time, various forces resulted in the shrinking of their body sizes. It doesn't necessarily mean that they lost all these interesting traits and behaviors. So even if there was like, it's one point size was a useful heuristic, where maybe you needed that at some point in evolutionary time, which I'm not saying is true, but even if it were true, It would be important to remember that actually that wouldn't always help us think about the organisms we're dealing with in the present.)
- Time 0:19:46
-

(highlight:: Sustainable Protein: The Rise of Insects in Animal Feed
Transcript:
Speaker 1
The big issue here is, you know, how did this conversation get started? Where did, how do we end up chatting about this topic in the first place? So the main way to think about this is there is a big change happening in the human demand for protein. There's expectation that by 2050, you're gonna get 70% more demand. And you've got a, that's driven by population increase plus a rising middle class that wants more animal-based foods. Then the question is, how are you going to feed the animals? People wanna eat? And the basic story about that is you can feed them, you know, either stuff we grow or stuff that we're catching from the oceans, you know, one of those two things, we are just running into Sustainability problems on both fronts, right? We're running out of fish to harvest for fish meal, and we're at the same time having problems with, you know, clearing deforestation to grow more soy to provide more protein. And so in that context, insects look like this very attractive solution because they can recycle waste. And so people are thinking, hey, we want the sort of circular system where the waste streams from all these other forms of food production are repurposed and converted into a high quality Product that can provide a high quality protein to the animals who humans wanna eat. In particular, fish, so farm fish and shrimp are actually the biggest applications right now. It's the easiest applications, it's where the most of the money is. But then, you know, potentially other kinds of animals. So, you know, I've got a colleague at Texas State who does work on black soldier fly as cattle feed. People are looking for any way that they can, they can use these insects and monetize them. So that's where the industry's coming from. That's what's driving the interest in it. There has been significant capital investment in the insects' food and feed industry over the last several years. And the challenge is to see if you can scale, to see if you can find ways of making this a sustainable enterprise. And of course, that's the thing that's going to create all the kinds of welfare concerns that we're familiar with from other industries, right? So it's one thing when Aunt Jenny is growing some mealworms in her shed so that she can feed them to, you know, her pet lizard or whatever. And it's a very different thing when you're talking about these facilities that might be rearing, you know, hundreds of millions, billions, potentially a trillion insects in a year. Now we're dealing with economies of scale from the producer side, but we're dealing with potentially enormous amounts of harm from an advocacy perspective and from a well-towered Perspective. As you want to look at the kinds of questions that are going to come up when you're raising animals at mass scale of this type.)
- Time 0:26:10
-

(highlight:: Different Ways of Slaughtering Insects and Their Welfare Implications
Transcript:
Speaker 2
One thing that a welfare issue that I do find quite striking in the insect case is I think Megan mentioned this in her talk, which we'll link below as well as the summary of the research Paper and some of your work on the welfare range table is the way some of these insects kill the things black soil deflies. They're actually either like microwave or put in an oven until they basically like die from like almost exploding, which it seems like that was like very best for like, wow, this is an Unbelievable way to kill animals. And you know more about that, am I remembering broadly correctly?
Speaker 1
So what's going on there is, you know, depending on the use of the insect, they are gonna be very different processing strategies. So sometimes you can grind them if you're, you know, depending on the way that you wanna use them. Sometimes though you're gonna wanna boil them. Sometimes you're gonna wanna flash freeze them. Sometimes you're gonna wanna, you know, microwave. Sometimes you're gonna wanna use ovens, et cetera, et cetera. And these are all depending on the intended outcome, what you hope the product will end up becoming. And of course, some of those ways of killing are really fast or at least relatively fast. So there's work on like how to speed up the, you know, the rate of killing when you're grinding. And so we can get that, you know, with some modifications down to a relatively quick slaughter rate. Some of these things are just inherently slow because that's what's required to desiccate the animal if that's the kind of product that you're looking for. And that just of course is gonna take, you know, minimally minutes to kill those animals. So if we think about, you know, how quick slaughter is now for terrestrial vertebrates, you know, we actually, it's still bad, but we've gotten the time to death down considerably and We're just not anywhere close to that on the insect trunk.)
- Time 0:33:35
-

(highlight:: Challenging Public Perception of Animal Welfare in the Feed Industry
Summary:
The challenge lies in getting the public to be concerned about the welfare standards of animals that are made into feed for the animals they consume.
This poses a significant obstacle in advocating for better welfare standards, especially when considering perceptions and comfort levels regarding insects as a feed source. Despite the industry being values-driven, public support may not be a central aspect of the current conversation.
Transcript:
Speaker 2
This is really gonna be an issue at the heart of the industry and something that I was just thinking there is challenge with getting the public to be concerned about the welfare standards Of the animals that they actually consume. So chickens, pigs, cows, fish. And now we're asking them to care about the welfare of animals that are made into feed for the animal that they're going to consume. And so it seems like such a giant leak further backwards than the kind of advocacy that we're working on right now that those approaches in the way that we tackle the industry is gonna Be really integral as to how successful challenging those welfare issues are going to be because that public angle is just seems at the moment kind of impossible.
Speaker 1
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Speaker 3
You know, it's a tough road.
Speaker 1
I mean, it's a tough road. And I think it's especially difficult in the case of insects just because, again, how comfortable people feel, thinking about them as dispensable, et cetera, how little people are Inclined to distinguish them from plants, the way that they are almost not fully categorized as animals. So yeah, these are just really hard problems. I'm not thinking about public support as particularly central at this stage to the conversation. There are a few things to say. One is though these are producers are indeed, you know, ultimately committed to building this industry and becoming really successful at doing it, it's a values-driven industry.)
- Time 0:37:57
-