Tom White

We test it with some difficulty because we can't, of course, just ask these animals.

We can ask one another.

From our perspective, behaviour is really the kind of best tool we have to get at the inside from the outside.

We are dealing with animals here that are so different from us that looking at the kind of brains that we use to feel things, it's not so useful as a guide to what an insect might feel.

So we instead turn to behaviour and there are a lot of discussion in sort of the science and philosophy of these things as to what kind of behaviours might be indicative of something going on on the inside.

We see our beautiful companion animals maybe licking a paw or limping.

We can look for these same indicators in other animals and that's exactly what we sort of went looking for in our crickets here.

So what did you do to these crickets?

One of the tensions and the unfortunate tensions of these research is that we go looking for pain.

So we do kind of intend to make them a bit uncomfortable.

So in this case, it was kind of similar to a person touching a hot pan, for example.

And they touch it.

There's that reflex, that initial very quick action where a nerve signal shoots to your spine, whips your hand away, and then comes the actual pain and you feel it.

And the person will, you know, you'll nurse your hand and run it underwater and look after it.

So we put our crickets through something similar.

We used a little hot probe and we touched it on their antennae and we made sure we did some work beforehand to make sure that it was warm so it's hot, meant to make them uncomfortable but didn't cause any lasting damage or injury.

So we touched them and then we had our control groups where we didn't touch them or we just gave them a little poke.

And we watched the kind of behaviors that resulted.

And what we found is, again, just like that person that, you know, you hold your hand and look after it or your cat or dog licking their paw, tending to it.

we found that crickets focused all their attention on that antennae.