(calm music)
- Thank you so much for being here this evening.
Should be really nice, fun event we've got.
To help celebrate the centenary
since Kafka's death,
not that we're celebrating the death.
So across the university this summer,
there's a series of events
and we as a section wanted
to think about some of the biology
behind some of the imagery and the subject matter
of the metamorphosis.
So in this panel discussion tonight,
we'd like to explore
really our relationship with insects as humans
and think about, well, as you may know from the book,
there's this really quite strong negative reaction
to this transformation into an insect.
And we'd like to kind of drill down into,
well, why is that the response that we tend to have
as humans to insects?
And then we also want to think about and talk about
the ethics of insects and our relationship with them.
Why do we perceive them in certain ways
and why do we treat them in certain ways?
And overall, I really like this to be a celebration
of insects and how remarkable they are
and all the things that they do for us
and thinking about our interactions with them,
especially in the face of global change.
So we're very lucky to be joined this evening
by a fantastic panel.
So we have Professor Rosemary Gillespie
from the University of California, Berkeley,
and she's the systematic entomology...
A chair in systematic entomology
and Professor of Environmental Science,
Policy and management.
And she's an evolutionary biologist
interested in the drivers and diversification
of populations and species.
She has served as president of the American Genetic Society,
the International Biogeography Society,
and the American Arachnological Society.
She's also the faculty director
of the Essig Museum of Entomology,
and currently the president
of the International Society of Arachnology.
She completed her BSC in zoology
at the University of Edinburgh
before moving to the United States to do a PhD
on the behavioral ecology of arachnids
at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Following this, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher
at the University of Hawaii,
working closely with the Nature Conservancy of Hawaii,
based off the island of Maui.
She took an appointment as assistant professor
at the University of Hawaii in Manoa.
In 1999, she left Hawaii to join the faculty
at the University of California, Berkeley.
She's currently on sabbatical here at Oxford
as a visiting senior research fellow in evolutionary biology
and biodiversity at Jesus College.
Next we have Dr. Clair Linzey,
who is the Deputy Director of the Oxford Center
for Animal Ethics.
She's also a research fellow in animal ethics
at Wycliffe Hall in the University of Oxford
and the Francis Power Professor
of Animal Theology at the Graduate Theological Foundation.
Her interests include a wide range of topics
in ethics and theology, including animal ethics
and animal theology.
She did an MA in theological studies
at the University of St. Andrews,
followed by an MTS at Harvard Divinity School.
She then returned to St. Andrews
to complete her PhD in theology.
In addition, she's director of the Annual Oxford
Animal Ethics Summer School,
an interdisciplinary event attended
by academics and students from around the world
held at Merton College, University of Oxford.
She serves as co-editor for "The Journal of Animal Ethics",
published by the University of Illinois Press
and is co-editor of the Powell Grave McMillion book series
on animal ethics,
which comprises more than 40 multidisciplinary books
on animal related issues.
And our third panel member is Professor Geraldine Wright,
who is the Hope Professor of Entomology
at the University of Oxford and is professorial fellow
of Jesus College.
She's an insect neuropathologist
and leads the bee lab in the department of biology.
She's interested in how insects perceive
and learn about their environment.
Specifically, her lab works with honeybees and bumblebees
studying their chemical sensation,
learning, feeding and ecology.
She completed her BSC in botany at the University of Wyoming
before joining the University of Oxford
as a Rhodes Scholar to complete her PhD in insect nutrition
and herbivory at Hartford College.
Following this, she took up a position
as a postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State University
where she investigated olfaction in honeybees
and also completed an MSC in statistics.
She then returned to the UK joining Newcastle University
as lecturer before progressing to reader
and then professor in neuropathology
in the Institute of Neuroscience.
She eventually returned to Oxford in 2018
as professor of comparative physiology
and organismal biology.
On becoming Hope professor of Entomology in 2021,
she became the first woman to hold
this prestigious position.
Okay, so just to start,
I'd like to have this as interactive as possible as well.
So we will have a question session at the end.
So please, if you have any thoughts or questions
as we go along, then save those to the end.
When we do get to doing the questions,
try and wait until we've got the microphone to you
before you ask your question so that everybody can hear.
So just to start off,
I'd like to do a little poll of the audience.
So first of all, just raise your hand if you like insects
and other arthropods and invertebrates.
Okay, so I feel like we've got a quite a good
easy job here tonight preaching to the converted.
Just out of interest, kind of conversely,
raise your hands, if you're brave enough,
if you are disgusted by insects
or maybe just certain types of insects, invertebrates.
Yeah, quite a few disgusted people too.
Okay, we'll see if that changes.
And then finally, just one to think about,
raise your hand if you believe that insects are sentient.
Okay and again, we'll come back to these at the end
and see if there's been any changes in opinions.
So to start off, I'd like to go down our panel
to each of you ask the same very open, broad question,
which you can answer and interpret how you wish.
So the first question is,
is our view of insects universal?
And just as a caveat,
every time I say insects this evening,
I'm not just talking about insects,
we're also talking about other arthropods,
other invertebrates with the kind of insects
being the group that's bringing that all together.
So Rosemary, would you like to kick off?
- Is it universal?
We should have had the questions before so we could prep up.
So I think it varies tremendously actually
in different parts of the world.
It does vary though, according to your age.
I think, you know, when I used to,
I work on spiders, so I don't profess to know
very much at all about insects,
but anyway, I'd go to the kid's school
and talk about spiders.
And when the kids were, you know,
four, five, six, seven,
it was, you know, you'd go in there and you know,
oh, how many legs does a spider have?
Eight, you know?
How many eyes?
Eight, you know?
And so they knew so much and they were so curious
and they so wanted to learn.
And then it seemed like, you know, when they hit puberty
and then that learning all becomes undone somehow.
And there's, you know?
So it seems like it's very much a learned behavior,
this kind of fear of spiders in particular.
But if they, if, you know, when they get older,
I think if they can,
if any students, if any people can learn about spiders,
I think it changes their attitude altogether.
I find that iNaturalist, when people get onto iNaturalist
and really look at things,
it changes their attitude altogether.
I teach a course in spider biology
and colleagues teach entomology.
And there, you know, the kids, you know,
in spider biology, they start off, you know,
why are you taking this course?
You know, they don't really know.
Some people are brave enough to say
that they're actually really scared of spiders
and they don't wanna touch them.
But then during the course, they actually learn,
they learn about spiders and they really,
it changes their whole outlook on the world,
not just spiders.
I mean, they're seeing things where they weren't before.
Anyway, you can go now, Clair.
- Yeah, I would have to agree.
I think it's enormously different,
from different cultural perspectives.
I'm a theologian by training,
and if you are a Jane, for example, a Jane Monks,
they sweep the floor in front of them
so as not to harm insects and not to step on them.
Whereas, you know, other cultures,
it's very normal to eat insects.
And obviously we've moved more towards
using insects in the western world,
which is why you're seeing the advent of industrial farming
of insects more than you used to.
So I think it is enormously culturally constructed.
I think it's also that it's also a sense
that some insects might be friendlier than others, you know?
And I think that's culturally constructed.
A lot of people really love ladybugs
and bumblebees which are obviously lovely and you know?
Nicole would know much more about than me.
But for example, bees are having somewhat
of a popular resurgence right now.
I would say you see it on a lot of jewelry,
you see it on a lot of apparel that you can wear,
and I think that they are revered in a way
in which other animals,
which maybe do similar jobs,
like wasps for example, are demonized.
And I think they are culturally constructed views for sure.
- Anyone knows me that I'm on a personal crusade
to convince people to love wasps.
- Didn't know that.
- Any thoughts on the universality
of our perceptions of insects?
- I think in the West,
at least what I was taught in school
is that we have a construction,
a social construction where we're at the top
of the said food chain
and everything kind of cascades down, right?
And a lot of sort of classical phylogenies even
were based on this sort of greater chain of being, right?
Where humans sat at the top
and everything was lower than them.
I don't think that other cultures
have that same view of other organisms.
So Clair just gave the example of the Jane's who have a,
I don't want to kill anything to, you know,
they want to only eat fruits or things
that trees give to them.
So they don't want, they have obviously
a different relationship to other organisms
than someone who believes that those things are there
to serve them in terms of where they are
in a sort of social hierarchy
or a even a sort of bio hierarchy.
So I don't think it is universal,
although I would say that our view,
as Rosemary was kind of alluding to,
changes when we become more educated
about anything that we know, right?
Organisms that are around us or the plants or fungi,
we start to have more respect for the amazing forms of life
that share the planet with us.
So I would say that over time,
at least in the West,
the viewpoint of our relationship
to other animals like insects has evolved
with the advent of general education of people.
But there are several other religions
that believe that life itself is, you know,
means that you have some sentience.
And so I think that
that would be my sort of ad hoc answer to that.
I don't.
- Just kind of touched on with all those answers there,
that there's some degree of change in these perceptions,
whether that's through age or through learning.
Does that suggest that our reaction to insects
is something that is fully learned
or is that some level or degree of innate reaction?
- Oh, I think there's a definitely,
I have an instinctual reaction to anything crawling on me,
biting me or attacking me.
And if you've been to the tropics,
you realize that many things do crawl on you,
bite you and attack you.
So I definitely think we have an instinctual response
to that I would...
Aversion to being bitten, crawled on, stung.
- Yeah, I don't know.
I'm not sure whether it's...
I can totally see that you,
one can have an aversion to being bitten,
crawled on or stung for sure.
Whether that means that we need to treat them the way we do?
I think those are two separate things.
And to answer your question,
I hope that that is something that can change
or that we can evolve to move beyond.
Oh, I mean, because one hopes that in general
we can move beyond the idea that,
oh, I don't like something,
or that's not a nice experience
to I can treat them, you know?
And thus I treat them a certain way, right?
You know, hopefully morally speaking,
we can distinguish those two things.
Even if our natural response is, oh,
or I'm frightened or whatever, you know?
I dunno if that answers your question.
- So do you think that instinctive reaction
is there some kind of evolutionary function
to that purpose?
- I'd say it's a bit hard.
It's hard to say how much is actually innate
and because the, you know,
I work in Hawaii where, you know,
there really aren't, there isn't much, at least, you know,
not much that's native that could do anything to you.
And you know, I would just sleep in the forest floor.
There were no ants, there's no, you know,
bees, no mosquitoes.
And so you know, in some places, you know,
there just aren't, I mean,
as you know, as we're saying,
you know, in the tropical areas like, you know?
Well Hawaii is tropical,
but going to, you know, the continental tropics,
then you've got a huge diversity of things
that are going to sting and bite.
And so I think there's a kind of innate feeling that,
you know, if something's gonna,
if something's crawling on you or something's, you know,
yeah, you're feeling something,
I think there's is a tendency
to want to get rid of it.
It's hard to know how much of that is learned, I don't know.
- Yeah, I think it's really hard to know
how much of it is learned.
I think it's also,
I think it is different in different cultures, you know?
I think it is, some things are more culturally constructed.
I mean, we were talking earlier about spiders and, you know,
and some places they seem less afraid of them than here.
So, I mean, it's hard to say,
but I think the question for me is less
whether it's innate and what we do with those feelings.
- Okay, so onto another big question.
I'm just going to ask first of all,
what is sentience?
And then follow that, do we think that insects are sentient?
And how do we pass that out?
Just start with- - No.
(everyone laughs)
- I'm gonna look it up on Wikipedia.
So sentience it means thinking, right?
Can they think?
What, are we gonna have a shared definition
of what we think sentience is
and then we can have an argument
about whether insects are or aren't?
- Philosophically, it often means the ability to feel
pain versus pleasure
and then corresponding emotions that follow.
But I also understand that other people include
definitions of consciousness in it.
So I think it is a bit,
I don't know if scientifically it's defined differently.
- Yeah, it's a bit of an odd term.
I mean, in my mind, you know, we justify...
We justify collecting things, as biologists,
we often justify collecting things and hurting things
saying that, you know, that they're not like us.
They don't feel like us.
But if you put a spider in ethanol,
it does not want to be there.
And you know, you are hurting that animal.
You try and minimize that and you know,
I, you know, as a biologist,
I justify all sorts of, you know, reasons for doing this.
But my feeling is that, you know,
if anything, is showing that it actually wants to live,
it does not want to die.
And so then, you know, you need to respect that.
That's kind of where my level of kind of
where the sentience comes in.
If something wants to,
if something clearly wants to stay alive.
- So a definition of it from the dictionary online
is that it's a not, it's distinguished from the mental
or intelligence, it's as a state or a feeling.
So at least the dictionary definition
is that it involves feeling.
So are animal sentient
or are insect sentient is what you asked, right?
- And is that the same for all insects?
- So when I was at Newcastle University,
I had a very good friend,
she still is my good friend named Melissa Bateson.
And Melissa is an expert in animal welfare
and was studying something called cognitive bias in animals
and looking for evidence for cognitive bias.
And people that study animal behavior
always wanna be careful that they're not anthropomorphizing
the animal's behavior, right?
They want to really have an objective sense
of what they're observing.
And so the folks that were working in animal welfare
really wanted to have a sense of if,
and to try to determine, do animals feel?
Do they have something that's akin to what we call emotion?
And they developed this term called cognitive bias,
which is actually applied also in human psychology, right?
So if you have a cognitive bias,
it means that when you're depressed,
you see the picture or the glass
as half empty or half full, right?
So if you're depressed, it's half empty,
and if you are feeling great, this is half full glass.
And we know from studies of humans
that if a person is depressed,
you ask them different sort of ambiguous question
and you give them a series of words
and ask them to say to define those words.
They'll hear a word like pain
and they'll think of physical pain
rather than something like a window pane, right?
So ambiguous stimuli are interpreted
with their sort of negative connotation.
And these people that work in animal welfare
were working with mammals,
with mice and other larger animals like cows
and trying to come up with assays
to see if they could do the same thing.
You know, are these animals that are kept in a, you know,
confined state depressed and you know,
can we give them this task?
And then look at these the way they respond to these tasks
to see if they would interpret them in a negative way.
Usually what that involves
is that you have a series of stimuli,
one of them's trained to a positive outcome
like a food reward,
and the other one's trained
to a negative outcome like a shock.
And then there are things in between that are hard
for the animal to tell,
whether it's the positive one or the negative one.
They have to make a judgment
about whether they're one or the other.
And when I heard that she was doing this with birds,
I, you know, 'cause we would sit around and talk after work
and I realized that, you know, in my lab
we'd been studying the bees sense of smell.
And we had this assay where we were looking
at discrimination of odors, floral odors.
We were trying to understand, you know,
the mechanisms of olfaction
and looking at how well bees are
at discriminating one flower from another
or one floral scent from another.
And doing it quite precisely by taking two compounds
and mixing them in a perfume to make different ratios
of the two odors.
And we know that when we do that,
the smells are similar but not the same.
And that they're, that you get a nice linear gradient
of the response of the animal to those scents.
So if you train a honeybee, which you can do,
bees are very good at learning to associate odor
with food reward and then you present her with a series
of these odors,
the extent to which she will generalize
her learned association to those odors
depends on the proportion of the two odors
relative to the one she was trained with.
And I had this task and I was like, oh, well,
you know, Melissa, we can train bees to associate
one of those odors with sugar reward
and the other one with a quinine punishments,
like a bitter taste on their mouth.
So we have the perfect assay
for actually assessing whether bees have emotion
because you have the same assays you're doing with birds,
but you're doing with visual stimuli
or we can do it with odors and bees.
So we designed a set of experiments
to test whether we could stress bees out
and see whether we could produce a cognitive bias
towards these odors.
And what we did is we had an undergraduate,
in those days, I didn't have so many in my lab,
but was using undergraduates really as researchers
and she was training
bees to do this task,
and then she'd take those bees
and half of them she would set to the side,
and the other half she would put on this machine
that we have in the lab called a vorticizer,
which produces vibrations.
So you put the animals on there
and you shake them violently for 30 seconds or so
and then set them to the side.
And then she would do her test
about 10 or 15 minutes after that.
I think it was 15 minutes, I'd have to check the paper.
I'm not sure how long she waited.
So she tried to stress 'em out by shaking.
We know that bees get really annoyed
when they've been shaking, right?
You put 'em in a truck and do you let 'em out?
And they're all coming for you.
So we decided the shaking would be a good
and stressful thing to do.
And sure enough, what we found is that on average,
the bees that had been shaken
were more likely to generalize negatively towards the odors
than the ones that were in the control treatment.
In other words, we could produce a negative cognitive bias
in bees as a result of this stressful event.
And this was the first evidence
that an insect had something
that was a correlate of emotion, right?
We're using a cognitive bias test, which is really strict.
And the reason that it's so strict
is that it's actually asking the animal to make a judgment.
It's divorcing the animal's behavior
from any kind of instinctual reaction
they may have to the food
or the odors themselves.
And really looking at how they generalize to something
and how that generalization is affected by an event.
So it's quite a strict way of looking,
an objective way of looking at emotion in animals.
And sure enough, you see it,
the first person to show this cognitive bias
was someone studying mice.
They found it in mice of course.
If you've studied it now in birds,
in all kinds of mammals, you see cognitive biases.
It's quite common now.
But the work that Melissa and I did was the first evidence
in an insect,
and it's been of course, studied, you know,
by several others since then.
You can produce a positive cognitive bias in bees
apparently by feeding them sugar.
Though I'd like to repeat those
I have to say those same experiments that Lars Chittka did.
I'm nonetheless, I mean, I guess that he can produce
a positive cognitive bias too.
- And there's something you said earlier,
you talked about sentence in relation to the animal
wanting to avoid harm
and encourage positive,
but surely that would fit a definition of all life, right?
It wants to grow, survive, reproduce.
- Well, yes, you're right.
Life does not want to die.
So yes, I mean I think...
I think in general, you know,
things by putting these stresses
on things that, you know,
that have every reaction against them, I think, you know,
against those stressors, I think...
I mean is that, I just think that we're causing harm
when we do that.
And I mean, some of course can be justified.
If a mosquito is, you know,
biting you, you can, I mean, it does everything
to avoid being being hit.
But you know, it's understandable why people want to hit it.
But anyway, it's a very, you know?
So Jerry's assessment of the situation was much more,
you know, thought out then mine.
I mean my, I just think that life is life
and we should respect it.
- Yeah, I mean I think that there's important things
to be thought about there.
I mean regarding, it seems like the science on sentiency,
we still might not have entirely decided what it is,
but you know, it seems like we're still gathering research.
Gera said she wanted to repeat some,
but I think we can all be clear that, you know,
life, animal, plant, insect, you know, most of it wants,
it is sensitive and capable of being harmed.
And at least from a moral perspective,
the question is, you know, what we do with that information.
You know, if we know that other lives
that we share the world with want to avoid harm,
avoid pain, what do we do with those ideas?
You know, perhaps it's incumbent upon us who have,
you know, greater moral faculties to, you know,
choose to live more peacefully with one another.
That's something you can't really do in the animal kingdom,
but humans can choose to live
at least sometimes more peaceably
with the rest of the world. - Sentience is is quite
a specific definition though.
So sentience is emotion.
And I think it's interesting to think about it again
with respect and make it quite an objective thing.
It's an emotion is a,
and essentially what we showed in this manuscript
with these bees is that they change state
when they're under duress of some kind, right?
They can change state
and that change in state then allows them
to make decisions in a different way.
And essentially that's what I think is the same
is true of our emotion, right?
Our emotion is a way of helping us
to basically produce a kind of,
gain control on decision making
that is contextual to experience that we have
in a sort of temporarily local way, right?
So I think that emotion,
certainly, I wouldn't be comfortable as a scientist,
you know, looking at a plant and saying
that a plant has emotion.
Because for me, I think that
what we see, it's okay. - No, I didn't mean
to suggest that. - Okay.
What we see as an emotion or sentience
is something that's produced by a,
basically by a brain, right?
And that brain itself is actually being modified
by other physiological variables
which are affecting the state of the organism.
So that could be hunger, that could be tiredness,
it could be fear.
- How simple can a brain get
before it's no longer a brain?
- I actually teach a lecture on that.
So the hydra has,
you know, allegedly neurons, they're kind of, you know,
they're not really neurons in the sense that we know,
we have in our sort of sophisticated brain,
but there are quite primitive animals
that have neurons.
They don't have a centralized brain,
they have a nerve net or a nerve ring.
And I imagine,
I don't know if anybody's shown that they,
they produce a change in state
and you can affect, you know,
the way a jellyfish is gonna react.
That that one, I don't think anyone,
that's for somebody in the audience to go and do.
So you need a summer experiment
and maybe you can change the state of a jellyfish
and see if you can produce a cognitive bias.
They can learn so even animals that have
these nerve rings can do
some very basic forms of learning.
But I would say they don't have the same,
I wouldn't say that a jellyfish could generalize
necessarily, you know,
in the same way that an animal
with a higher brain would,
but even a nematode can learn and generalize.
- So, you know, where do we draw the line,
you know, in these definitions of sentience?
Or is it possible to have a binary (mumbles)?
- I think you could, I think you could carefully define it,
that, you know, emotion as a change in state
that alters judgment.
And then you would just have to do, you know,
appropriate tests to show that some animals
don't exhibit that behavior
if you wanted to be quite precise about the way
that you apply a motion to animal life.
But a lot of invertebrates have changes in state, right?
That are affected by their external life or by stress
or by other things that then affect their behavior,
even instinctual behaviors.
But the really strict definition
is to look at something that involves cognition
or generalization where you are,
you learn about something
and you generalize to a novel stimulus.
Your brain is capable of allowing you
to form an abstract rule
that you then apply to a novel situation.
- Yeah, I mean, philosophically,
I mean, I did not mean to suggest at all
that plants are sentient,
but when philosophers talk about sentience
in relation to animals,
I mean they define it in terms of pleasure,
pain, fear, anxiety, you know, feelings.
But also, you know, most people begin
with animals and birds,
and now reptiles, fish, cephalopods,
and I think insects is the next,
is the next question where we're waiting
for the scientific answers
on whether we think we can say that.
And it seems like maybe.
- I think Lars Chittka is now,
and a group of scientists in the US have decided
that insects are sentient, so.
But you know, I'd be interested
to hear from the audience a bit about
whether they think that insects are sentient or not.
- So given our evolving understanding of sentience,
when, if ever, is it okay to squish a bug?
(everyone chuckles)
- Who are you asking?
- Clair, do you want to say?
- Well, I don't know.
I think that that's, you know?
I think the question of whether one can squish a bug
is really a greater question
of how we want to live in the world, right?
And you know, a lot of other cultures
practice reverence for life, right?
And that's all life.
And I think if you think about the fact
that insects are in decline,
that is problematic for human beings,
I think developing the ideas that actually,
other than human life matters.
Like, okay, if the bug has malaria
and you know, that's then self-defense.
Okay but you know,
if in general, should we be trying to find a way
to live more peaceably
with the rest of the world?
I think so, if only because it's in our best interest
to do so.
I mean, I'm not an expert on insects,
but my limited research told me that
75% of all agricultural crops are pollinated by insects.
And that actually, if we don't like foster
our relationships with the insect world,
that actually we are going to be in terms
of food systems in real problems.
So yeah, I think there's not a immediate answer
to should you should or not do that.
I'm not a...
I think avoiding pain is something,
and suffering is something we should be
generally avoiding if we can.
And that's just how we should approach
relationships with the rest of the world.
- Do you think- - Well, I agree totally.
I think we need to have...
We need to respect life.
And even, I mean, as biologists,
we often end up, you know,
killing things for a study.
But when we do that, we need to at least acknowledge
what we're doing and think about, just think about it.
And we kill a mosquito and I mean,
I've killed, you know, a lot of mosquitoes
and I've, you know, ticks,
you know, they're kinda gross.
But I think they're fascinating though.
When you look at mites, which are basically ticks,
I mean, they're just fascinating animals.
So I think the more we understand
and the more then we can, you know,
engender respect for what we're looking at.
And I think, yeah, it's really important
that we learn to respect the world we live in.
- So a question for you, Gery.
I'm interested thinking about how perhaps
perceptions of all of this varies
for things like social insects
and the super organism versus the individual.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
- In terms of?
- Well, if the decision making capability
of the superorganism,
if that degree is any kind of confers
any degree of sentience
or how we treat it differently?
- So the person I worked with as a postdoc, Brian Smith,
used to like to point out to the,
when he was at conferences,
to mammalian neurophysiologist that there as many neurons
in a bee colony as in a mammalian brain.
And they're working together to, you know,
to accomplish a quite an amazing feat.
So it does, I mean, again, I'm biased 'cause I like bees,
but I would say they're a higher form of life for sure.
They, you know, they farm, they collect food,
they look after their young, they produce milk,
they have, you know, quite a dance language.
They have many traits that, you know,
we might consider some of our higher achievements,
the social insects.
So yeah, I have a lot of respect for social insects.
I mean yeah,
and I would encourage anyone in the audience here
to learn what you can about them
'cause they're fascinating,
ants, bees, wasps, all amazing.
- Okay, so next general question
for all of you is,
should we be eating insects?
- I think, I guess there's two
kind of ethical answers to that.
I mean, some people would say that eating insects
is better in terms of environmental footprint
than eating animals and mammals.
But I mean, I think we have to ask the question
as to whether industrially farming anything
is really in our best interest.
I mean we are industrially farming them
in the trillions already, right?
Which is a huge quantity of animals
we're just choosing to use for our own benefit.
And I don't know, I think the science isn't, you know?
If you scale that up,
is that environmentally still better than not eating cows?
I don't know, but I mean,
to pose it differently, do we need to eat them?
Like do we need to eat them to live?
I would say no.
So if there, since there are other alternatives,
I'm gonna go ahead and say it's not morally necessary
to do so.
So maybe we don't have to.
- I'll agree again.
I mean, the thing is we have the capability now
to make whatever food we want.
And so we were just talking about this earlier.
Why, you know, why are we relying on a technology that was,
you know, that we developed farming, we developed,
this is gonna maybe be unpopular,
it's certainly unpopular with my family,
but farming, you know, was developed a,
you know, centuries ago.
Do we really need to keep farming going
when we have alternatives
and we're developing alternatives
and that are more efficient, that are, you know,
more environmentally friendly?
And I think I feel like focusing on that alternatives
makes more sense in my mind
than farming insects.
- I have a very different viewpoint.
- Yes, please, yes.
- I would say yes we do.
And I would say that we can't afford to stop farming
because we need protein.
And that's the problem with currently
with the foods that we have
is that we don't have enough types of sufficient proteins
for the human population on this planet
and we are hungry for protein.
I think that insects are basically
a type of protein potentially.
They could be used both to feed animals that we eat,
but they could also be a very good source of animal protein
that people could eat.
And that is relatively low impact to the industrial farming
that's done for higher level animals
that produce, I mean a lot of waste,
that actually cost a lot in terms of the amount of energy
and food per unit that you have to feed them
to produce their tissues.
So I have a completely different viewpoint.
I really don't think that we can afford not to eat insects
or to farm insects or to not farm animals
until we have alternatives to animal meat
that are actually as nutritious and as abundant as animals.
we won't, even though all of us have the best intentions,
you know, to be vegetarians,
and I've been, I have to say,
and I'm gonna confess I've been a vegetarian
for 30 years now.
So I try very hard,
but I also understand now
the importance of eating protein in a way personally,
but I'm also a professional who studies
the nutritional biology of insects
and have been exposed to understanding
nutrition of animals through my research.
So yeah, my opinion's the complete opposite.
- Do you think that there would be,
if we weren't industrially farming animals
who after all you have to grow the food to feed the food,
they're actually a protein system in reverse.
You have to feed them vegetables so that they can survive
and then they take up a huge more land, water, space.
And you know, if we weren't indeed farming industrially
and in some cases not intensively,
actually like spaciously in Brazil,
animals are farmed non-intensively
and takes up enormous amount of land.
It's part of the deforestation problem.
I mean, if we were instead devoting that land
to raising vegetables for us all to eat
or, you know, growing things differently,
do we not think there might be enough food for enough,
for amount of people on the planet?
Plus, isn't it at least partly
a consumption problem per capita?
You know, in the west we consume much more.
- Well, that's part of the problem,
and I would agree with you that there's a lot of waste
of animal tissue and a lot of waste in animal farming.
So I'm not defending farming as it is in that respect.
But I would say that given the number
of people on the planet
and our growing population,
that the plant foods that we have
are just simply not sufficient
to meet the demand for the protein that we need.
The closest that we have is soy.
Soy is a, in terms of its amino acid profile,
is very close to animal tissue, which is why it's so used
in cattle farming or in farming of any other animals,
is that it's conversion from plant tissue into animal tissue
is more simple because the ratios of the essential
amino acids are more closely matched to our own tissues.
But that's not true of other plant tissues.
And a lot of the other plants that we eat
either don't have a high enough concentration of protein
or the amino acid ratio is just not closely matched
to what's in our tissues.
So it really requires quite a lot more,
for you to eat quite a lot more of those things
to meet your needs for protein than you would
if you were eating a much smaller amount of animal tissue.
- Wonderful, thank you very much.
So at this point, I'd like to go to the audience
and take some some questions from you to our panelists.
Either someone specifically or the whole panel.
So we have a microphone if, yeah, if you can.
Yeah, we'll start just where the microphone is.
- [Spectator] Hi, I was just thinking about disgust
and thinking about it being culturally constructed
and when I think about why insects are revolting to some,
they are associated with death.
Fairly explicitly, they decompose.
You find a dead creature and it'll be covered in bugs.
And I think that that association that we make,
I think that is fairly universal
and I mean I think humans will always sort of feel
negatively about that association with death.
So I wondered if you could talk about insects as decomposers
as being connected to the bigger idea of death.
- I kind of wanna say that I think at least our ideas
about death are culturally constructed as well though.
I spent quite a bit of time in Latin America
and their ideas around death are quite different from ours
and have much more sense of celebration of death.
Yet insects don't immediately speak to me of death,
but I'm not a biologist.
So perhaps they do to you?
- I think we have, I know we have instinctual reactions
to the smells, the putrescine and some of those smells
that are produced by rotting carcasses, right?
So those compounds, if you smell,
you know, basically, you will have a retching response.
So it could be that, you know, we associate,
there are many different things
when you have a rotting carcass.
You've got all the bacteria that are, you know,
breaking down those tissues
plus the insects that are carrying those things there
and then using them, right?
But I mean the...
I'm fascinated by the animals that eat carcasses,
it's amazing, an amazing job they're doing, right?
We would be in a lot of trouble
if we didn't have decomposers.
But yeah, in terms of their sort of attractiveness,
they're not, you know, butterflies or bees.
It's a bit gross.
- Well, butterflies are partial to a carcass as well.
- Are they?
- They're just taking salt, so they're not breaking it down.
- Right.
- Well spiders aren't partial to carcasses at all,
but people are still pretty revolted by spiders
for whatever reason, but yeah.
But that was...
- [Spectator] Hiya, I'm just wondering,
why do you think people hate cockroaches?
Because even a lot of people who don't like,
who are fine with insects just really hate cockroaches.
They don't bite, they don't have diseases,
you can get them even in clean places.
Like, I don't like cockroaches,
but I don't know why,
whereas I don't mind like most of the other stuff,
but I really wanna kill a cockroach.
And I think other people too,
So like why do you think,
where has that learned thing come from?
- That's actually a fascinating question.
You know, we were, for many years we were in Honolulu
and you know, the cockroaches would come in under the door,
like in, you know, loads would come under the door
and my husband would get up in the middle of the night
and I'd just hear, you know,
where everyone's peaceful and then boom, boom, boom,
you know, with the cockroaches.
So they tend to be in the dark,
which is partly, you know,
why people are worried about spiders.
At least that's my feeling.
They move fast, they're in the dark,
they're in dark places
and they don't, you know,
kind of like what Gery was saying,
they don't smell good.
- Yeah, they don't smell good
and it's because they can recycle
their uric acid into,
or their, think it's uric acid into urea.
So they can basically, they're extremely efficient
at recycling nitrogen and so they smell bad
and they kind of leave a kind of nasty smell.
- I'm kind of fascinated by cockroaches actually.
I mean I hear they're like one of the few things
that would survive a nuclear blast, which is like,
I mean that and Twinkies.
I mean, so, you know, really interesting.
But also I do think there is,
I mean I don't know if it's culturally constructed
or if the cultural we have praise on it,
but I mean the metamorphosis, I mean the story of a man who,
at least in the version I read becomes a cockroach, right?
And then even his whole family who he's given his whole life
to taking care of them, you know, will him to die.
And, you know, I dunno if you grew up watching
"Men In Black" where the basically the baddy is a cockroach
and you know, that's, you know?
And I think that plays on our fear of them.
So yeah, but I mean that's interesting
because I don't, do we have them in this country?
I'm not sure I've actually ever seen a cockroach
now that I think about it, but you know?
We do. Okay, alright.
- Yeah, there's a few species which have become cosmopolitan
being moved around by people associated with human.
But there are also some ones that you can find out
in the wild as well in the UK.
But less associated with being synanthropic.
I will just add as well that many species of cockroach
as they're feeding on detritus
will leave a trail of feces and spread bacteria.
So they is an association there with potentially
with disease transmission.
- They also have quite sharp hairs and spines on their legs.
- Yeah, yeah. - They're quite actually,
if you try to pick them up, it hurts.
I don't know if you've ever tried that,
like your common cockroach basically
because that's a defensive mechanism probably,
these hairs on their legs.
- [Spectator] I was wondering if there's something around
the history of where we think bugs come from in that,
to my understanding, many, (spectator clears throat)
many of the Europeans thought that cockroaches,
bugs, flies, maggots, that kind of thing,
all the stuff that most people would agree are gross,
they thought that they spontaneously were formed by mess,
by waste, by dead bodies, et cetera.
So if we think that these things are sort of born
from stuff that we have a natural aversion to,
maybe that's part of the cultural biases
we have against insects.
And the way I was brought up,
I was taught that they're like there to help clean up
all the mess and if we didn't have them,
we'd all be like, you know, piled high with bodies and waste
and all kind of nasty things.
So I'm wondering if there's something around
the cultural history of where we thought they come from
versus rather seeing them as helpful cleaners.
And I also have a,
I wanna ask a dumb question,
but I'm hoping it's in a smart way.
Why do flies fly into the window again and again and again
and ignore the open door?
I feel at the moment, I feel like with summer coming,
I'm just a doorman for flies constantly
trying to get them out of the house.
So yeah, that's my dumb question.
- They don't have the visual resolution
to tell the pane of glass.
It's a much blurrier world for the fly.
So they can't see the difference
between your pane of glass and the open doorway
right next to them.
- Does that mean if you cover the plane of glass
and opened it, you know, with something,
they would go towards?
- Yeah, they would.
They'll orient both towards light and also toward,
and probably towards wind as well.
- And any thoughts on the first part of that
with the spontaneous generation from putrid objects?
- I hadn't read.
I don't know, I think it's interesting.
- I guess it's kind of chicken and egg as well, right?
With is that association seen
and then the connotations come from that
or was it the insects were appearing?
- [Spectator] So about the cognitive bias essay
you talked about earlier.
How do you eliminate the possible individual variance
in sensitivity to certain sort of bitterness and sweetness?
- How do you reduce the?
- [Spectator] How do you eliminate the effect
of individual variation in sensitivity
to bitterness and sweetness?
- Well, we keep track of how well they learn the task
to start and we can keep track of,
you know, some of them might be much better
at do doing that task.
I mean, we're also using very extreme
rewards and punishments.
So the reward is quite good to a bee
and the punishment is quite strong, you know,
not very good tasting.
So that's hopefully helps them to learn that task.
That's a really easy task for a honeybee to learn.
If you basically you do a,
what's called a psudorandomization
of the presentation of the trials
where they receive the reward and the punishment
so that they can't predict on any given trial
which one's coming.
And then you look to see if they learn the association
and then in the case of a honeybee,
we can train them to extend their proboscis
to recognize an odor.
So we feed them, touch the antenna,
they put their mouth parts out
and within two or three trials,
a bee will have the mouth parts out
when you present the odor that is a signal of the reward.
So we can see very quickly that they've learned it.
And you can, you know, if you give these bees 16 trials,
eight of them were with reward and eight with punishment,
by the end you can see very clearly
that they can distinguish those two things.
So that when we're doing these tasks,
if we'd have animals that don't learn at all,
we don't tend to include them in the memory test
because we don't know why they're not learning.
And again, we're trying to give them a task
that is fairly simple for bees to do.
- [Spectator] Hi, Professor Gillespie,
at the beginning you mentioned
that students are children,
the more they learn about insects,
the more this disgust decreases.
The more increased, approach behavior increases.
Yeah, so I was wondering on a personal level,
if you three feel that your particular knowledge
about insects or arachnids
or anything has decreased your disgust
and what the limit of that is?
Do you eat insects?
Have you eaten insects?
Do you feel that you are more likely
to be willing to eat insects
now that you know lots of things about them
or are more interested in them generally anyway?
- Well, I think Cadburys accepts that every bar
of chocolate will have,
may have up to six insect legs in.
So I think statistically,
everybody's here has eaten some insects.
I think that is.
You know, I don't think I need to eat insects.
So I'm not going to start eating them as a choice,
though I accept that I will have eaten them
at different points.
But I think learning more about them, I mean,
I feel like I learned quite a lot about bees,
which has appreciate, you know,
I already like bees.
But I feel like I know more about 'em now.
I didn't know they produce milk.
So I feel like...
I feel like the more you know about insects,
the more you know about anything,
the more reverence increases towards other life.
- Yeah, I think that was,
I mean it's an interesting question.
I think...
I think it is always the respect.
And I mean I think, it's been so long ago since, you know,
I started working on spiders
and I can't really remember
what I was thinking back then.
But you know, certainly, you know,
going into some, you know, tropical areas,
learning what the diversity is,
you get a whole different appreciation for, you know,
what is there.
I'm not sure about eating at all,
but I think the big thing is really...
Is respecting what, you know, just understanding
and sufficiently to where you can really
respect what the life is and what the diversity is.
I should say, it gets super complicated.
You know, again, I'm coming from a perspective
working in Hawaii,
and Hawaii is, you know, it's inundated
by all of these things that are not native.
And so I've got a, you know,
as Jerry was saying, you, you know,
you respect bees and ants and wasps.
I have this kind of almost, you know,
now built in hatred for ants because, you know,
they're all decimating the native forest in Hawaii.
And so you get these conflicts come up.
But I think for me, you know,
it's, you know, understanding the thoughts
that are going through and you know,
recognizing that actually these ants are very efficient
at what they do.
It's not their fault that they're there,
but the equation becomes more, more complex
as you learn all of these different components.
- An answer from me.
I can't overcome my disgust.
(everyone laughs)
So no, I don't eat insects.
I think that's for a couple of reasons.
One of them is when I think this is just an example.
When I was just a newly sprung PhD
and I was still here doing some teaching,
I was teaching a lab
on the dissection of the squid.
And I was bent over the squid,
dissecting that squid to practice for the lab, you know,
in order to teach, you know,
all the different bits of the squid.
And I gave the carcass to my Spanish colleague in the lab
who then made it into a paella and everyone had it,
but I couldn't do it.
The smell of it was too much.
I just, after sitting over it.
And so I have an element to which I just,
the smell is just not appetitive to, I don't know why.
And you know, people have given me like cricket cookies
and things like that, and I'm just like,
I don't know, the smell of insects.
Maybe it's 'cause I've worked with 'em so much, you know,
in high densities that I just, I don't find it appetitive.
But yeah, maybe I might be able to overcome that
if I were eating it and, you know, it was an association
with something nice like chocolate.
But no, I don't eat them.
- Brilliant, thank you very much.
So yeah, that's all we have time for this evening,
but hopefully you all enjoyed that as much as I did
and I would just like to lead a round of applause
to thank our amazing panel.
(audience applause)
(calm music)