Do insects feel pain?

All living things need to interact with the world outside themselves. Key to the separation of self from non-self is the ability to detect unwanted intrusions, in the form of damage or injury. The basic ability to detect such damage is well described and is common to virtually all animals. The subjective perception and experience of such injury, however, is known as ‘pain’, and is both far more complex and consequential than the simple detection of injury. Once thought the exclusive domain of humans, the ability to perceive pain and, hence, experience suffering, has since been demonstrated across a suite of vertebrates. Despite this progress, the question remains unresolved among invertebrates, and particularly insects, which comprise some 80% of the world’s animal species.

Here we seek, in part, to remedy this oversight. Guided by a recently-developed framework for assessing invertebrates’ capacity for pain, we will combine manipulative behavioural experiments with model insects and evidence synthesis to generate original, holistic insight into the capacity for pain in the most diverse and abundant group of animals on the planet. The benefits in scientific terms will be advances in our knowledge of the physiology, ecology, and evolution of core sensory and cognitive processes. While in applied terms this work will speak to the urgent need for ethical guidance on insect welfare. With insect farming for food on course to become the largest livestock rearing project in history, and the daily use of insects in waste and pest management, research, entertainment, and medicine, an answer to this deceptively simple question will reverberate across social, economic, and scientific domains.