Mar
30
Two new studies indicate that crustaceans feel pain and stress and two of many practices that may warrant reassessment are ripping the legs off live crabs and crowding lobster in to seafood market tanks. These findings indicate that all animals including fish, shellfish and insects can suffer.
Robert Elwood, the lead author of both papers, explained to Discovery News that pain allows an individual to be “aware of the potential tissue damage” while experiencing “a huge negative emotion or motivation that it learns to avoid that situation in the future.”
Robert and Appel gave small electric shock to the crabs within their shells. The crabs that were shocked left the old shell and entered the new shell, showing stress-related behaviors like grooming of the abdomen or rapping of the abdomen against the empty shell.
It has been thought that the behavior of crustaceans is mostly reflexive, but the fact that they showed signs of physical distress at the same time they changed a behavior in this case, moving into another shell, suggest they feel pain as well, according to the researchers.
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