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Do Insects Feel Pain?

Insects make up about forty per cent of living species, and we tend to kill them without pause. New research explores the possibility that they are sentient.

“The default view of the vast majority of the general public, as well as many of my colleagues, is that insects are largely reflex machines,” Lars Chittka, a behavioral biologist who researches bees at Queen Mary University of London, told me. Many have nociceptors that send signals to other parts of the insect brain, such as the central complex (associated with spatial navigation and locomotion) and the mushroom bodies (linked to learning, memory, and sensory integration). This year, Gibbons, Chittka, and their colleagues evaluated whether bees meet a sentience criterion called “flexible self-protective behavior.” When a person bumps her elbow, she might rub it (and not her knee) to try to ease the pain.

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