I think this comment misunderstands the kind of work I expect the Arthropoda foundation to be doing.
Right now, we are farming insects, but we don’t know very much about what is good or bad for them.
We might like to make recommendations like ‘don’t torture very large numbers of insects’, but because we don’t have really robust science on what conditions they might find torturous, this is hard.
I expect that the Arthropoda foundation will be focused on non-civilisation-upturning, action-relevant questions like that.
What would change my mind on the usefulness of this work is if I was shown some research from an animal welfare organisation that produced some concrete information (i.e. not qualified by massive confidence intervals) about “what is good or bad” for an animal or “what conditions they might find torturous”, beyond what we can already intuit.
So far have not seen anything like this, and I simply cannot imagine what sort of experiments or work you could do to get any useful information on this.
My experience with insect welfare science is that the conclusions are rarely intuitive because insects are so physiologically and behaviorally different than vertebrates. What about the work done on black soldier flies, slaughter methods, mealworm rearing, etc do you find to be not concrete, or to what extent do you find the conclusions to be intuitive? I would have had no idea, for example, based on intuition alone, what stocking density to rear yellow mealworm larvae at to minimize the risk of disease, cannibalism, or early mortality, or other indicators of stress. But because of science in this space, we now have a decent idea! The best way to reduce confidence intervals is to do relevant research.
I’m curious what you’ve been reading that’s made you say this generally, because animal welfare science is a highly concrete research field, that has made many recommendations for specific improvements for animals that would not have been obvious without the research, so I find this incredibly surprising to hear someone say who has read in the space. The experimental methodologies have been developed and critiqued for decades, they’ve just rarely been applied to insects.
A lot of the data assumes growth and survival as your main measures of welfare/stress which is just doing the industry’s yield optimisation research for them rather than welfare research. It is analogous to setting up a chicken welfare institute that tries to make bigger and longer-living chickens. A proxy of welfare, in a way, but we don’t need welfare research orgs to do this work.
The other concrete data in those papers are things like: the demonstrated preference of BSF maggots for honey over sugar water, data on the optimal grinding method to kill BSF maggots most quickly, and data on optimal densities to normalise breeding behaviours. The part that is betrayed by confidence intervals is the implementation. Without any way to define or measure the value of maggot suffering with any confidence, there’s no way to know whether the costs of implementing any of these changes are justified. At least with vertebrates we have some intuitions about how much their suffering matters to fall back on.
I haven’t actually watched this talk, but it’s titled ‘How can we know what is good for insects,’ and includes a section on why our intuitions might lead us astray
In general, the interaction between a species’ social dynamics and stocking density in farms. Different species will have very different reactions to close contact with lots of conspecifics — for some species this may be very stressful, whereas for others it seems ~totally fine, and this is basically (IIUC) not studied in many relevant species.
[I’m an unaffiliated amateur]
I think this comment misunderstands the kind of work I expect the Arthropoda foundation to be doing.
Right now, we are farming insects, but we don’t know very much about what is good or bad for them.
We might like to make recommendations like ‘don’t torture very large numbers of insects’, but because we don’t have really robust science on what conditions they might find torturous, this is hard.
I expect that the Arthropoda foundation will be focused on non-civilisation-upturning, action-relevant questions like that.
What would change my mind on the usefulness of this work is if I was shown some research from an animal welfare organisation that produced some concrete information (i.e. not qualified by massive confidence intervals) about “what is good or bad” for an animal or “what conditions they might find torturous”, beyond what we can already intuit.
So far have not seen anything like this, and I simply cannot imagine what sort of experiments or work you could do to get any useful information on this.
My experience with insect welfare science is that the conclusions are rarely intuitive because insects are so physiologically and behaviorally different than vertebrates. What about the work done on black soldier flies, slaughter methods, mealworm rearing, etc do you find to be not concrete, or to what extent do you find the conclusions to be intuitive? I would have had no idea, for example, based on intuition alone, what stocking density to rear yellow mealworm larvae at to minimize the risk of disease, cannibalism, or early mortality, or other indicators of stress. But because of science in this space, we now have a decent idea! The best way to reduce confidence intervals is to do relevant research.
I’m curious what you’ve been reading that’s made you say this generally, because animal welfare science is a highly concrete research field, that has made many recommendations for specific improvements for animals that would not have been obvious without the research, so I find this incredibly surprising to hear someone say who has read in the space. The experimental methodologies have been developed and critiqued for decades, they’ve just rarely been applied to insects.
A lot of the data assumes growth and survival as your main measures of welfare/stress which is just doing the industry’s yield optimisation research for them rather than welfare research. It is analogous to setting up a chicken welfare institute that tries to make bigger and longer-living chickens. A proxy of welfare, in a way, but we don’t need welfare research orgs to do this work.
The other concrete data in those papers are things like: the demonstrated preference of BSF maggots for honey over sugar water, data on the optimal grinding method to kill BSF maggots most quickly, and data on optimal densities to normalise breeding behaviours. The part that is betrayed by confidence intervals is the implementation. Without any way to define or measure the value of maggot suffering with any confidence, there’s no way to know whether the costs of implementing any of these changes are justified. At least with vertebrates we have some intuitions about how much their suffering matters to fall back on.
That makes sense!
Again, very much not an expert, but some examples that might qualify:
The work of Dr Amaya Albalat and her team at the University of Stirling. Crustaceans are so different from vertebrates that I think some of this is quite non-intuitive to me.
I haven’t actually watched this talk, but it’s titled ‘How can we know what is good for insects,’ and includes a section on why our intuitions might lead us astray
In general, the interaction between a species’ social dynamics and stocking density in farms. Different species will have very different reactions to close contact with lots of conspecifics — for some species this may be very stressful, whereas for others it seems ~totally fine, and this is basically (IIUC) not studied in many relevant species.