FLICKR, JOHN HASLAM
Invertebrates will respond to certain dangerous stimuli by trying to escape, but these animals lack the brain regions associated with the sensation of pain in vertebrates. As a result, some scientists have assumed that invertebrates can’t sense pain in the same way that vertebrates do. Yesterday (November 11), a pair of UK-based researchers published results in Biology Letters that potentially upend this perspective.
In a 2014 Animal Behaviour paper, researchers from Canada and the U.K. offered a set of criteria to determine whether an animal is experiencing pain, including learned avoidance behavior and measurable responses in physiology. Robert Elwood, an animal behavior researcher from Queen’s University Belfast, had previously shown that invertebrates can learn to avoid electrical shocks, but had not linked this observation to ...
