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On Research Podcast – Navigating the Ethics of Insect Research: Sentience, Welfare, and Scientific Responsibility

Posted By:   CITI Program Staff Posted On:   July 31, 2025

Season 3 – Episode 7 – Navigating the Ethics of Insect Research: Sentience, Welfare, and Scientific Responsibility

This episode discusses the ethics and welfare of insects in research.

 

References and Additional Resources

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Podcast Chapters

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To easily navigate through our podcast, simply click on the ☰ icon on the player. This will take you straight to the chapter timestamps, allowing you to jump to specific segments and enjoy the parts you’re most interested in.

  1. Opening Reflections on Sentience Evidence (00:00:00) Dr. Barrett discusses how current evidence for insect sentience surpasses past evidence for bird sentience when legal protections were granted.
  2. Podcast Introduction & Episode Overview (00:00:36) Alexa McClellan introduces the podcast, the topic of insect research ethics, and the episode’s guests.
  3. Guest Introductions & Backgrounds (00:01:22) Dr. Barrett and Dr. Fischer share their backgrounds and how they became interested in insect research and animal welfare.
  4. How Insects Are Used in Research (00:04:11) Dr. Barrett provides an overview of the diverse roles insects play in scientific research and their value to science.
  5. Defining Sentience & Assessing It in Animals (00:06:43) Dr. Fischer explains the concept of sentience, its relevance to animal research, and the challenges in assessing it scientifically.
  6. Applying Sentience Frameworks to Insects (00:12:00) Dr. Barrett describes how sentience assessment frameworks are used to evaluate evidence for insect sentience and summarizes key findings.
  7. Evidence for Insect Sentience & Precautionary Standards (00:13:54) Discussion of specific evidence supporting insect sentience, the precautionary approach, and historical context for animal welfare standards.
  8. Ethical Considerations & Instrumental Reasons for Insect Welfare (00:18:20) Dr. Barrett outlines why researchers should care about insect welfare, including scientific rigor, cost, and public trust.
  9. Minimizing Harm in Insect Research (00:22:03) Dr. Fischer discusses what minimizing harm means in insect research and practical steps for reducing unnecessary harm.
  10. Applying Vertebrate Animal Welfare Principles to Insects (00:25:25) Discussion on adapting established animal welfare frameworks (like the 3Rs) to insects and the challenges of species-specific guidelines.
  11. PI and Research Team Responsibilities (00:28:36) Dr. Barrett explains the ethical responsibilities of principal investigators and research teams when working with insects.
  12. Institutional Norms, Public Trust, and Policy (00:31:41) Examination of how institutional policies and public expectations influence insect welfare practices and scientific trust.
  13. Future Directions: Community Dialogue & Best Practices (00:34:36) Dr. Fischer emphasizes the need for more open conversations and collective best practices in the scientific community.
  14. Future Directions: Evidence Gathering & Research Needs (00:36:17) Dr. Barrett highlights the importance of gathering more concrete evidence on insect welfare and cognition for future progress.
  15. Closing Remarks & Podcast Outro (00:37:26) Final thoughts, acknowledgments, and information about CITI Program resources and podcast credits.

 

Episode Transcript

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Dr. Meghan Barrett: What I think is notable for me in informing how I act, is that the evidence for insect sentience now far exceeds the evidence we had that bird sentience was plausible 50 years ago when they were granted some level of legal protection. And so if that lesser evidence could justify those legal welfare protections for birds then, better evidence can justify minimally me taking some personal harm reduction approaches for the insects in my lab now.

Alexa McClellan: Welcome to On Research with CITI Program, where we explore the evolving landscape of research ethics, integrity, and innovation. I’m your host, Alexa McClellan. Today, we’re taking a closer look at a subject that’s often overlooked in conversations about research ethics, the use of insects in science.

Insects play a vital role in everything from genetics to neuroscience to ecology. But are we doing enough to consider their welfare? What do we really know about insect sentience and what responsibilities do researchers and principal investigators have when working with these small but significant creatures? We’ll unpack these questions and more with our guests, Dr. Meghan Barrett and Dr. Bob Fischer.

Meghan Barrett is an assistant professor of biology at Indiana University, Indianapolis, and director of the Insect Welfare Research Society. And Bob Fischer is a professor of philosophy at Texas State University and a member of the Board of the Insect Welfare Research Society.

All right, well, thank you so much for joining me today, Meghan and Bob, I’m really excited to get into the details of insect research ethics with you. But before we jump in, can you tell us a bit about your background and how you became interested in studying insects? Meghan, I’ll start with you.

Dr. Meghan Barrett: Great. So my name is Meghan Barrett. I’m an assistant professor of biology at Indiana University Indianapolis. My lab research is insect thermophysiology, neurobiology, the intersection of those areas with farm and laboratory insect welfare, and I’m the director of Insect Welfare Research Society. So I’m an entomologist, but unlike any entomologists, I didn’t start out as a kid totally fascinated with bugs, which I know is the story for many entomologists.

And instead, I was primarily interested in neuroscience and medicine, but I ended up in Dr. Jennifer Apple’s lab at my undergraduate institution, SUNY Geneseo, as a research assistant working on ant genetics. And I took her seminar course at the same time. And between that class on social insects and the research experience, I just found myself totally hooked.

Alexa McClellan: Great. Thank you so much. Bob, what about you?

Dr. Bob Fischer: So Bob Fischer, professor of philosophy at Texas State University. I had been working on issues connected to animal welfare in one way or another for the last 15 years or so. I have been interested in lots of different topics related to animal welfare, ranging from food production to wildlife management, to thinking about whether we should keep our cats indoors to save the birds, all sorts of different things.

And over the last several years, I got more and more interested in the edges of sentient, which animals exactly are sentient, which ones might have the ability to feel things like pleasure and pain and what might that mean for thinking about what responsibilities we have and what would it look like to have a approach to research ethics that was sensitive to our uncertainty about which animals are sentient. And so, when you start thinking about the edges of our knowledge in this particular respect, insects are a natural place to go.

And by various twists and turns of fate, Meghan and I started collaborating on projects not really having anything to do with this four or five years ago, and it really snowballs once you know an entomologist. You get sucked in and you doing way more work on these topics than you originally anticipated. But that’s been a great pleasure and delight. So I’ve really enjoyed the ride into this particular domain.

Alexa McClellan: Great, thank you so much. So Meghan, can you start by getting us an overview of how insects are typically used in scientific research today?

Dr. Meghan Barrett: Yeah, it’s a great question and because they’re used for almost everything, it’s actually hard to give an answer. But insects essentially power a substantial amount of the modern scientific enterprise and they’re often relatively cheap to rear. They have these fast generation times in many cases. And because there are no welfare protections like we’ll talk about later today, it is often said you can do anything to an insect. And that gives researchers maximal flexibility in the kinds of questions they can ask with these animals, the methods they can employ, the number of animals they can use, etc. And so we’ll talk more about that later, but I think that’s key to understanding the variety of questions people can address with insects.

Of course, I think when we think about insect research, one of the first things that’s going to come to mind is pest management purposes, trying to protect human interests by reducing populations of disease vectors or parasites or agriculturally destructive pests, if you will, species. But even though that is a lot of the work on insects, I really think that would undersell all the cool things that we study in insects. So we study their behaviors, things like tool use or facial recognition or transitive inference, numerical cognition, some great work out of Eric Frank’s lab recently about wound tending behaviors in ants.

In my lab where we’re really interested in the evolution of sociality in bees, ants, wasps, termites, etc., And how that impacted their brain. Obviously, we are studying insects and documenting their diversity in the wild, understanding how they’ve adapted to the incredible number of ecological niches that they feel. There’s a lot of insect conservation research, what management actions are going to best protect their populations in this era of habitat destruction and pesticide overuse, climate change, which we’ve turned the insect apocalypse if you’ve heard anything about.

And then of course we also use them for a lot of really foundational questions on therianthropy and physiology, trying to understand the relationship between form and function. We work on them to understand how to farm them, whether that’s for silk or for food or for fashion or for feed or for pollination. There’s tons of genetics, there’s biomedical research purposes for trying to garner insights into chronic and acute pain, mood disorders, addiction, and trying to understand how to address those challenges in people.

And they’re also very powerful for pedagogical purposes. So many students, I think, first interactions to animal anatomy and physiology or even animal behavior and undergraduate labs are going to be mediated via insects. So I could keep going on, obviously, this is a topic I love to talk about, but it’s really hard to overstate how much value insects bring to the modern research enterprise.

Alexa McClellan: Wow. That’s so many different uses. So that gives us a good solid foundation about how insects are used. But before we dive deeper, let’s set back for a moment and talk about a core concept that will come out throughout our discussion today. And that’s sentience.

I know, Bob, you mentioned being interested in that just as you were introducing yourself. Can you tell us a bit about what that word means and how we think about assessing it in animals?

Dr. Bob Fischer: Sure. So we’re talking about sentience. What we mean is that they have conscious affective states. There’s something it’s like to be that animal. There’s an experiential perspective. We often just use the word feelings when we’re thinking more colloquially.

And we want to clarify that when we talk about sentience, we’re not necessarily talking about an experience that’s anything like what a human experience is in terms of intensity or the range of possible states. It doesn’t even have to be the same as lots of other non-human animals.

We just need to have some kind of affective states. So we’re after the idea that is relevantly similar to pain, the thing that we would identify as pain, but we’re not talking about qualitatively identical. Because of course, we’ve got lots of capacities that many insects are going to lack.

So when we are talking about animals using research, the affective state that we’re often most interested in, although not the only one, curiosity can be an affective state, but the one we often are talking about is pain, because that’s the one that for ethical reasons we’re most interested in mitigating.

So because we’re interested in the idea, we’ve had a general moral mandate to reduce the amount of unnecessary pain that we cause, especially when individuals are under our care, when animals are under our care, we’re interested in the range of being better sentient. So we need to make sure that we’re recognizing that we’re not after proof.

We’re not going to have definitive, decisive, knockdown, drag-out evidence that any non-human animal is capable of experiencing pain. It’s a subjective state. It’s not accessible to us with the standard tools of science. We can’t just open up the brain and see sentience. That’s not the way things work. So what we can observe is no susception, the animal’s perception of and response to some noxious stimulus, and that’s related to but distinct from the subjective experience of pain that we’re really interested in.

Even in other humans, just to make this as pointed as possible, we can’t objectively observe that they have this subjective experience, but it doesn’t mean there’s no evidence that supports there’s pain in other humans. We’re pretty confident, but we’re doing is we’re relying on these various indicators, proxies like self-report and the fact that there are these similarities between their nervous systems and our own and our behaviors and all of these sorts of things.

And we make a cumulative case for the plausibility of sentience, both in other humans and then in non-humans. And so of course things get harder in the non-human case, because their nervous systems get progressively less similar to our own. The behaviors get progressively less similar to our own. We lose some proxies. Bees don’t tell us exactly how they’re feeling at any given time. So we can’t just rely on those sort of straightforward cues.

But even for animals, there’s much more widely accepted to be capable of experiencing effective states of being sentient, mice, dogs, cats. So there’s still a degree of uncertainty. We don’t know definitively, but we think it’s plausible, and so we put measures in place to minimize the potential that we cause them, the risk that we cause them unnecessary harm in the event they do indeed feel pain.

So the way to think about that is just in general, we’re operating with this broadly precautionary orientation. We know that we’re not after definitive proof when it comes to deciding how to act. We’re after getting to a level of plausibility that makes it appropriate to put some precautionary measures in place. And so that’s what we’re after when we’re talking about how we assess this, finding the kind of evidence that would make it so that it’s reasonable to have some precautionary measures.

When we do that, what we do is we set up frameworks that help us be impartial in our assessment of the evidence that look at some neurobiological data and some physiological data and behavioral indicators. And those don’t prove anything, but they make sentience plausible and more plausible the more of those proxies you’ve got. And that makes it appropriate at some point to go on and attribute sentience or at least act as though these animals are sentient.

And so you’ve got these frameworks like this Smith and Boyd framework for 91 and Lynn Stedden as a framework from 2014, and then Jonathan Burch’s team as a framework in 2021, which updates the Smith and Boyd framework. And those are all tools that people can use to start putting the evidence together and building that cumulative case.

Alexa McClellan: So Meghan, can you use that and orient us towards insects? Now we know what sentience is, how does that apply to insects?

Dr. Meghan Barrett: Yeah, great. So those frameworks that Bob just mentioned, what we can do is we can apply those to insects. We can see how much evidence there is looking at those criteria for these potential indicators of sentience. So that Burch framework he mentioned from 2021, it’s been particularly popular, I would say recently partially because of its historical grounding in that Smith and Boyd framework, which was traditionally used for assessing vertebrate sentience in 1991. But it’s got some kind of key updates to that original framework that come from our better understanding of animals’ nervous systems and behaviors today.

So if we look at that framework, it has a criteria. Four of them are now biological, four of them are behavioral, and we can assess different groups of animals. Do we find evidence that they meet any of these criteria? And so typically, the frameworks applied at the level of the order, although Bob and I actually have a paper out about why we might not want to apply to the level of the order.

But anyway, typically it’s applied at the level of the order, which is what we did in 2022. So myself with Lars Chittka’s team at Queen Mary University London led by his then graduate student Matilda Gibbons, and then also some folks from Jonathan Burch’s team to try and be very consistent with their initial review of the evidence of cyclopods and tickle pods.

We applied this criteria to six orders of insects and two of them that are especially well-studied, the diptera and the blotonia, they meet six of eight criteria to a high or very high degree of confidence at the adult life stage. We did assess them at the juvenile life stage as well, but I think the main story there is that people don’t research juveniles, and so there’s very little to know.

Now to put that six of eight criteria in context for you, what does that actually mean? The class to which the octopuses belong, the cephalopods meet seven, the decapods, which are your crabs, your lobsters, your shrimp, they meet five. So we’re right in the middle of some of those other invertebrates that have been assessed using this framework.

And so what does some of the data actually look like then when we’re talking about the literature we reviewed, the 350 studies we reviewed in that for that paper, one of the criteria that makes sentience more plausible, even if it doesn’t prove it, is the presence of nociceptors. And so there is evidence in insects for those nociceptors, which are sensory cells of the periphery that specifically bring in information about noxious stimuli. We found evidence for higher order sensory integration, which is something that people think is an important feature of the brain for producing kind of integrated experiences in animals.

And we found evidence, at least in the diptera, of direct connections between those sensory integrated brain regions as well as direct connections to the nociceptors. There’s evidence in insects that the nervous system can be modulated in its response to noxious stimulation. And then on the behavioral side, we’ve got things like flexible motivational trade-offs involving noxious stimuli, self-protective behaviors in response to noxious stimulation of varying kinds that can include site-specific localizations.

So imagine a dog licking its paw if it has an injury. That site specificity tends to be something we think is important and we can find that also in insects of different taxa. Anybody who works on associative learning and insects knows that there’s a tremendous amount of evidence for associative learning of a variety of kinds associated with aversive stimulation and things that go far beyond just a demonstration of habituation or sensitization. But those are the data for which we found in some orders, not all the orders, but in some orders there were studies that indicated each of these kinds of criteria were present.

And I would say the other interesting thing is that in most of the orders, and for most of the criteria for which we didn’t find high or very high degree of competence, we mostly just found no research at all. So no one had researched that order at that life stage for that criterion that we could find. There was very few data that we found that said, “Oh, this is evidence that taxa or an order cannot meet this criterion.”

Having listed all of that data, and I can talk about some of my favorite studies about insect analgesia and chronic pain paradigms in fruit flies, I still just wouldn’t want anyone to walk away from podcasts thinking that I think insect sentience is definitively proven or and trying to make the case for that. But I think Bob has done a great job of discussing that the standard we use when deciding how to treat other animals in research isn’t really one of definitive proof. I also am not definitively sure that mice have sentience, but I do think this historical precautionary standard is really important.

And there’s a lot of other scientists and experts looking at this data who are coming to a similar conclusion that maybe this is plausible enough to take seriously. Whether that’s the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness from 2012, the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness in 2024, both of which mentioned insects. There was a great survey actually by Zippel et al last year. They looked at animal behavior researchers and found that the majority believe at least some insects to have feelings.

Animal behavior has actually been leading the way in this for a very long time. They have included the consideration of the ethical treatment of insects in their publication standards since the early 2000s, which I thought was really cool when I learned that from their ethics editor and the Royal Entomological Society has also been more recently a leader in this as well. They released a statement on the ethical treatment of insects in research last year.

So when I’m looking at the evidence that I’ve just described to you to try and inform my own actions, because I am an animal researcher working on precisely these animals, what I think is notable for me in informing how I act is that the evidence for insect sentience now far exceeds the evidence we had that bird sentience was plausible 50 years ago when they were granted some level of legal protection. And so if that lesser evidence could justify those legal welfare protections for birds, then, better evidence can justify minimally me taking some personal harm reduction approaches for the insects in my lab now.

Alexa McClellan: Yeah, absolutely. And I want to mention too, you listed some great references and sources there for our listeners, and we can put those links down the description below the podcast so that our listeners can read those themselves as well to learn more.

Dr. Meghan Barrett: Absolutely. Great.

Daniel Smith: I hope you’re enjoying this episode of On Research. If you’re interested in conversations about technology ethics, join me, Daniel Smith, for CITI programs to podcast On Tech Ethics. You can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Now, back to your episode.

Alexa McClellan: So we’ve talked about how insects are used in research and what we know about their capacity for sentience. Now let’s turn to the ethical side of things and specifically why and how we should care about insect welfare, especially when they’re not covered by most animal welfare laws.

Dr. Meghan Barrett: Great. So I mean, of course Bob and I have already covered the intrinsic case, the moral argument, so I won’t go into that any further. Although, I will say that we ran a survey of entomologists and what we found is that that’s the most stated reason that other entomologists put for caring about insect welfare on our survey. So that is an important reason. I’m just going to say we covered it and I’m going to move on to what we now call a class of reasons called instrumental reasons.

And so that would be things like improving scientific rigor, cost saving, improving public trust, training mental health or inclusion outcomes in the research community. Those would be instrumental things we could care about, also associated with taking insect welfare seriously. So if we start with that idea of rigor and reproducibility, one of the most stated instrumental reasons on that survey was caring about how thinking about welfare could improve study design, data interpretation and reporting of our methods.

So for instance, there’s some research in mice right now that suggests that variation in the way the animals are housed that has to do with their welfare can essentially serve as a confound in behavioral neuroscience and biomedical research. So we don’t have standardization and good reporting across studies for how animals are kept and the impact of that on their welfare. We can get substantially different results that also fail to generalize to our populations of interest that might not experience the same kinds of stressors as our research animals experience.

One might think that the animals in my lab get handled much more often than their wild counterparts might get handled as one example of a different stressor. And so it’s really early days for this kind of research on insects, but it does seem plausible from some published studies that these differences in stressors that could induce putatively negative welfare states, things like hunger or stress, those could induce phenotypic changes that we might want to think about more seriously in our experimental design as impacting our results and thinking about more seriously and how we publish and report on them as well.

It’s partially the design aspect and partially the reporting aspect where we don’t report on what we are doing from a welfare perspective. Like let’s say I say that I anesthetize my animals, but I don’t specify which anesthetic agent I use. Different anesthetics can have different behavioral effects for the animals after they wake up and different physiological effects. There’s a great by Keith McMillan in 2017 that shows that in drosophila.

And so altogether thinking about welfare in both the design of our experiments and the reporting of them could improve reproducibility and generalizability of our results, which is something that I think basically all scientists care about a lot. Their instrumental reason people pointed out was minimizing cost or labor. So I mentioned before that there’s no requirement in insect science to think about the number of animals you’re using a priori, you can do whatever you want to as many as you want.

And so sometimes that leads to as many as I can possibly manage approach. I might even be guilty of this myself. And this can be a strength of the discipline, the fact that we can use so many animals, but it isn’t always a strength of the discipline when it means that we aren’t thinking about some of those other costs to time or resources where we could be more efficient.

And so by considering things like what effect size is meaningful to us by considering that a priori, which is something the principle of reduction demands, and thus this is more common in vertebrate research to do things like power analyses a priori. By doing that, we can make sure that all of our costs are genuinely going towards understanding a biologically meaningful effect or relationships where studies don’t become overpowered, which waste labor and resources in animals, and they’re not underpowered, which you could arguably also think waste labor and resources in animals because we don’t have confidence that we’ve genuinely observed a true result.

Alexa McClellan: Absolutely. So one of the core components in animal welfare regulations is the ethical responsibility of the researcher to minimize harm. What does minimizing harm look like in the context of insect research?

Dr. Bob Fischer: That’s a great question. I think one thing to say by way of preface is just that the word minimize is a extreme term. And the sense that a lot of people hear that and they think, “Well, that just means I don’t get to do anything. I have to just stop doing all of my research.”

And the reaction to that is a different kind of extreme, where it just says the status quo is therefore okay. So what we want to do is try to find some way of thinking about what minimization can mean, where it’s striking the balance between not giving up on animal research entirely. We’re going to keep using these animals for research purposes and pedagogical purposes, etc., but also not just therefore being fully concessive to the status quo.

And for the sake of time, we’ll be brief here, but one way of coming at this is just to think about the different kinds of questions that you ask when you are holding up minimization as a kind of ideal, not saying that you’re always going to get there, but you just are beginning to think more concretely about reforming practices. So maybe pedagogical cases are the easiest ones to talk about, but think about a very simple question that you come up with when you’re working with students and say you’re going to use some cockroaches for some neuroscience lab, and you now face this question, well, how large should the groups be?

Well, the larger the groups of students, the fewer cockroaches you’re going to use. And most people probably don’t think to ask that question. It doesn’t occur to them like, “Oh, well, I normally do groups of two, but actually would it just be fine with groups of four?” That’d be half as many cockroaches. That would be a significant reduction. It would be a way of minimizing the use of insects in that context. And if the pedagogical effect wouldn’t change, then that just looks like a clear win from both an animal welfare perspective and there’s no pedagogical loss.

So often what minimizing harm looks like in the context of research is just asking these questions concretely about, well, what would it be like if we just factored this in as a consideration? What if we were willing to do a power analysis before the research project so that we were addressing the kinds of power issues that Meghan was talking about just a few minutes ago? What would it look like if we asked these pedagogical questions about exactly what benefit is being provided by, say, having students sample some number of insects from the environment or what have you? How much do that do they need to do to get the intended pedagogical benefit?

So I think a lot of this is recognizing that neither extreme, both just accepting the status quo or trying to completely eliminate all possible harm is the way we want to think about this. We want to think about, well, what are some reasonable steps that happen once we just start asking concretely and seriously how we can move toward a less harmful set of experimental and pedagogical practices?

Alexa McClellan: So I wonder, can we take what we’ve learned from vertebrate animal research and apply it to insects?

Dr. Bob Fischer: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is another way of just fleshing out the idea that we were just discussing about minimizing harm. So the 3Rs can be applied to any group of animals. Russell and Burch in 1959 developed these, the 3Rs. That framework was designed to be perfectly general in its application and could go to invertebrates as well.

And it’s also the case that welfare frameworks, not ethical frameworks for managing animal use, but rather welfare assessment frameworks like the five domains, those can also be applied to any group of animals. So we can use those tools to get a better understanding of animal welfare and think more concretely about what it looks like to take care of insect welfare. The tricky thing is not extending the frameworks, rather it’s coming up with the specific details, the guidelines, the recommendations.

So it might be easy enough to recommend anesthesia for an invasive procedure, but they’re going to be different respiratory physiology of insects, and that’s going to require us to have different guidelines for insects than vertebrates. So we have to be really careful to make sure that the specific guidelines that we give are tailored to the unique behavioral needs, physiologies of insects, and we can’t treat them as like mini mammals.

And I think in many ways, the reason why we did the course was precisely because we wanted to make sure that there was something out there that was addressing these distinct needs of insects and framing them as the unique kinds of animals they are. And of course, it doesn’t just come up in the context of distinguishing insects from mammals. They’re also very different. We’ve got a million known species, maybe they’re 5.5 million out there that are to be discovered right in total.

So we’re going to have to recognize that the insects themselves are going to have dramatically different needs. And although maybe the bulk of research in the US is going to be on just a select group of species, there are a lot of insect researchers out there who are using different species in that they have to think about the specific needs of their taxa.

And so because this field of science is young, thinking about the needs of individual insects, and we have a long way to go providing those concrete recommendations. And one of the things that we’re very interested and motivated to do is to grow the conversation around this topic and get other researchers thinking about, well, how can they contribute to addressing these kinds of questions.

Alexa McClellan: And Bob, you mentioned a course, and I just want to let our listeners know that you and Meghan just authored a course for CITI Program on working with insects in research settings that is available to take now. So you mentioned the investigators working with these insects, and I’m curious, what’s the responsibility of the PI and the research team when working with insects in the lab?

Dr. Meghan Barrett: I think about this a lot as an active insect researcher, where I’m trying to engage more with this ethical responsibility that is new to me in the sense that I didn’t get training on it during my graduate days. And so it feels like a still new ethical responsibility for me while trying to productively operate my lab. And so without many of the traditional supports that are provided for other animal researchers that work on taxa, where this is a mandate, there are supports provided alongside that mandate that helps them to engage in ethical animal use, whereas it’s not that way in entomology.

Broadly, I think our responsibility is to try and be proactive in anticipating the potential welfare harms our work, proactive in assessing if we have the evidence to know how to mitigate those harms, thinking through the costs of mitigating them, whether that’s time or labor or sacrificing some knowledge advance or whatever. And then really thinking through making an all things considered best judgment about how to proceed so that any unnecessary welfare harms are minimized. That could include replacing reduction in refinement, like that 3R framework, while still thinking about those other responsibilities.

I have fiscal responsibilities, responsibilities to my trainees to ensure they have good work-life balance, so on and so forth. And so trying to make that all things considered best judgment with welfare considered in the picture of labor, time, cost, etc. I also think I have this responsibility to my trainees to ensure that there are opportunities for them to discuss insect welfare, to receive some kind of training if they’ll be working with live insects on what are signs of potential distress, when should they be reaching out to me if they see something aberrant, and making sure that they can come to me if they aren’t comfortable with a lab practice, whether it’s a husbandry practice or an experimental practice, so we can choose and reevaluate what to do because of that discomfort.

And I think this is a really key part of establishing that culture of care, where I have this responsibility to my trainees to make sure that they feel that the lab is a caring environment and that their concerns are going to be listened to. I also think a lot about the responsibility I have to my funders and given their values. So many animal welfare nonprofits have funded some of my work recently in places like the Animal Welfare Institute, and I wanted to ensure that the work that I’m doing with the funds that they’ve granted us is conducted with their values in mind.

And so for those studies, we do things like submitting IACUC protocols for internal and external review, and that’s to get feedback to make sure that we are improving the things that we can, that we’re maximizing our attentiveness to the values of my funders. And so eventually, I’d love to be able to do that for all of my studies. That’s a goal as we continue to iterate our labs policies and procedures, we’re aspirational in that sense, but we really want to make sure that when we have these kinds of funders, we’re meeting their values.

And so I think one of the main hurdles for many entomologists and where taking insect welfare seriously feels challenging and where this ethical responsibility feels challenging, our survey data shows that this is because entomologists don’t really have any training formally or informally on how to do this, and so it feels like a looming, scary responsibility. But I think a lot of it for me on the daily, if you will, it’s just like a shift in habits and a shift in mindset to being a little bit more attentive and careful to the lots practices.

Alexa McClellan: Absolutely. So individual researchers and PIs play a big role in setting ethical standards, which you spoke to about how you can model best practices as a PI. The broader scientific community also has a part to play. So let’s zoom out and consider how institutional norms, policies and public trust come into the picture. How might taking insect welfare seriously influence public trust in science?

Dr. Meghan Barrett: Yeah, this is another great instrumental reason that actually many scientists did put in our survey when they talked about why they cared about insect welfare. So there have been a few high profile instances recently of public upset over insect studies. Anybody who’s interested in this should actually listen to this podcast called Into The Killing Jar. It’s a podcast episode produced by the BBC. It covers one of these instances of legal collection of wasps in the UK and the public concern around that and how the entomologists responded and thought it through.

So there’s growing concern by the public. We know this for insects from both the intrinsic perspective, also the biodiversity perspective. Entomologists are doing a lot of outreach to inform people about the value insects bring to our ecosystems and their decline. And as part of that, people are getting excited about our organisms, and that’s amazing. But it also means there’s going to be increased scrutiny of our research practices, and we know that that lack of ethical oversight could have impacts on public trust.

So there’s this great study by Michael Brunt. He’s a sociology researcher in Canada, and he showed that the public trust of the Canadian public and scientists declined when they learned that invertebrate research was conducted without ethical oversight. So essentially, when they surveyed the public at Canada, they believed that invertebrate research should be receiving about two thirds the level of ethical oversight as vertebrate research, which obviously is not to the level of oversight that invertebrate research is currently receiving in Canada or here in the US.

And so the authors of this study actually concluded that essentially the social license that we had to conduct scientific research on these animals is threatened by the gap that exists between the public’s expectations for oversight and the actual current oversight structure.

And so in line with this, I’m actually currently conducting some research with Dr. Brunt, again funded by the Animal Welfare Institute. And we’re surveying both the US and the UK public and looking at how the public’s interest in funding studies changes with or without welfare refinements to common entomological methods. And the results are preliminary right now, we’re currently working on the data analysis, but currently that seems to suggest that there’s actually a boost in the public’s willingness to fund many entomological research questions when our methods are refined to improve insect welfare and not when they’re refined in other ways that have no effect on insect welfare. So I think there’s both a public trust aspect and a funding of the work aspect that should be considered when we’re thinking about why taking insect welfare seriously could matter for scientists.

Alexa McClellan: Yeah, so this is fascinating. I think we could talk about it a lot longer. There’s so many interesting nuances. But in closing, I want to give you both a chance to look into the future and to talk about what the next frontier might be and how we think about and how we treat insects in research.

Dr. Bob Fischer: Well, actually, I think much of the new frontier that we should be getting into is actually doing very, very ordinary sorts of things. My experience in joining the entomological community as an outsider, but now as a steady companion for the last few years is that there are a lot of people who have quite thoughtful, nuanced views about this in the entomological community. And there are not many fora for them to have conversations about this and think about what collective best practices would be.

And so when you start probing, what you find is the majority of people actually would like there to be some basic precautionary measures put in place. They would like to have some best practices guidance, and they don’t really know what that would look like. And they don’t really know where to go for serious discussion about this that doesn’t feel to them like it’s completely hostile to the very enterprise that they’re a part of.

So I think one of the key things that we can do as a scientific community is just get much better at having collective conversations about these kinds of issues. And if you think about the way progress has happened and lots of other issues in science, it’s just that people started discussing them more openly. So how did we improve inclusion issues? We just started talking about a lot.

We put it on the agenda, and the same thing can happen here. And I think as it does happen, the ideas that people already have and the openness to small but steady improvements that people already have will become more obvious and I think will be productive for all involved.

Alexa McClellan: Thank you.

Dr. Meghan Barrett: So it’s funny to me that Bob’s future directions are focused on discussing things, and all I could think about was what evidence needs to be gathered next, like what is the scientific study that needs to happen next. So I was going to say things like we need more concrete information about these animals and what they may experience and what conditions may improve or harm their welfare, and what valid indicators of welfare state could be for a wide variety of species, behaviorally or physiologically.

I’m fascinated by insect cognition research, which many of my very talented colleagues do some amazing work on that, and I’m really interested in how… We know there’s variance among different insects and their cognitive abilities, how could that variation in cognition impact the possible welfare states and needs they might have, thinking about enrichments or other things.

So that intersection between insect cognition and welfare is also really interesting to me. So to me, a lot of concrete evidence gathering is a critical next step.

Alexa McClellan: That’s why it’s so important to have these partnerships in research, so we get multiple perspectives on what needs to happen. Bob and Meghan, thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Dr. Meghan Barrett: Thanks so much for having us.

Dr. Bob Fischer: Thank you. This was great.

Alexa McClellan: That’s it for today’s episode. We hope this conversation has sparked new thinking about the often unseen ethical dimensions of working with insects in research. CITI program offers self-paced courses on human subjects research, good clinical practice, IRB administration, and responsible conduct of research. You’ll also find role-based training for clinical research coordinators, principal investigators and clinical research associates, enhance your skills, deepen your expertise, and lead with integrity across research settings.

If you’re not currently affiliated with the subscribing organization, you can sign up as an independent learner and access CITI Program’s full course catalog. Check out the link in this episode’s description to learn more.

As a reminder, I want to quickly note that this podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not designed to provide legal advice or legal guidance. You should consult with your organization’s attorneys if you have questions or concerns about the relevant laws and regulations that may be discussed in this podcast. In addition, the viewers expressed in this podcast are solely those of our guests.

Cynthia Bellis is our guest experience producer, and Evelyn Fornell is our line producer, production and distribution support provided by Raymond Longaray and Megan Stuart. Thanks for listening.

 

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Meet the Guests

content contributor Meghan Barrett

Meghan Barrett, PhD – Indiana University Indianapolis; Insect Welfare Research Society

Meghan Barrett is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Indiana University Indianapolis and Director of the Insect Welfare Research Society. She studies insect neuroscience, thermal physiology, and welfare.

content contributor Bob Fischer

Bob Fischer, PhD – Texas State University

Bob Fischer is a Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University and a member of the Board of the Insect Welfare Research Society. He’s also the author of Animal Ethics: A Contemporary Introduction (Routledge, 2021) and the editor of Weighing Animal Welfare: Comparing Well-being Across Species (Oxford University Press, 2024).

 

Meet the Host

Team Member Alexa McClellan

Alexa McClellan, MA, Host, On Research Podcast – CITI Program

Alexa McClellan is the host of CITI Program’s On Research Podcast. She is the Associate Director of Research Foundations at CITI Program. Alexa focuses on developing content related to academic and clinical research compliance, including human subjects research, animal care and use, responsible conduct of research, and conflict of interests. She has over 17 years of experience working in research administration in higher education.

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