Tom White

So they groomed it, they held it with their hands, they brought it to their mouth, they nibbled on it, and they did so much more frequently than either of our other groups, and they focused on that antennae that was touched.

And they did so for a long time as well.

How long would they do it for?

We popped the probe on, and that was maybe five seconds, and then the crickets themselves would tend to these things for... We watched them for ten minutes, and after about four or five minutes, then they were back to sort of baseline.

Oh, that's really annoying.

That hurts, but like, I'm okay.

It's, you know, we can get over it.

I'm just frustrated.

So that was the level of discomfort that we were trying to introduce to our crickets.

And that's pretty well what we saw, we think.

And what that tells us is that these are very unlikely to be kind of hardwired robotic sort of reflexes, the kinds of things that for a long time, we thought that's all that insects were really capable of.

And so instead that starts to suggest that there's something more going on.

And we think it's reasonable at this stage to think that that something more might be feeling.

Why crickets?

I think there are two broad reasons.

Crickets are an excellent system for this kind of question.

One is that crickets are a very old group of insects.

They're members of an evolutionarily ancient group.

So they arose quite early in the tree of life.

So if we do find cool, interesting capacities in these insects, it suggests that similar abilities might be also present in all of the other millions of species of insect that we see today.