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Don’t reach for the bug spray: scientists find insects may feel pain after crickets nurse sore antennae (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/science@lemmy.world
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The behavioural cue of ‘flexible self-protection’ is a way to establish whether an animal feels pain, scientists say

Crickets that received the hot probe “overwhelmingly” directed their attention to the affected antenna – they groomed it more frequently, and tended to it over a longer period of time, he says. “They weren’t just agitated and flustered. They were directing their attention to the actual antennae that was hit with this hot probe.”

Link to the paper

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[–] 27 points 5 months ago (8 children)

Also the fact that bug's are silently going extinct and nobody cares to notice, seriously stick your head out the window right now and listen, that is a silent apocalypse my friend.

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  • [–] 10 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    75% decline of flying insects population in germany

    https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/19/europe/insect-decline-germany/

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    For what it's worth, my totally non scientific personal experience is that in Denmark, the number of insects that I have to clean off the car has trended upwards in the last two years

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    I could make aong crazy post about this. This is bad. I wanted to be an entomologist my whole childhood and i consider myself an amateur one. There are no bugs. Where there should be ants and earthworms, there are none. After a rain worms should be all over the place, the castings should be found everywhere. I keep looking and they are not there. I went to at least 20 lakes last summer in my canoe fishing with my kid and looked for aquatic insects. There are none. So there are so small fish. So there are no big fish. I just went all over florida just last week, i saw a couple of butterflies. No mosquitos, no ants, no spiders, no anything. Every year my building is really close to lake erie and gets covered in insects in the spring, havent seen a single one. I keep looking and haven't found anything.

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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago

    I remember road trips in the summer, in the 90's, where you'd just see a bunch of bugs splatter on your windshield, and where you'd have to periodically scrub them off with windshield scrubbers.

    Now, 25+ years later, I almost never see bugs on bumpers and hoods and side mirrors. Certainly not to the same degree.

    And I can believe that computer aided design helped make all cars much more aerodynamic so that fewer bugs would actually be hit and more would slip into the airflow around the car, but the sheer magnitude of the dropoff makes it totally obvious that there are just fewer insects around.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago*

    When I was a child my dad's garden was full of all kinds of butterflies. Then the ownership of the field on the other side of road changed and almost from one day to the other they were all gone and never returned.

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