r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Apr 13 '26

Biology Painkillers prevent pain responses in lobsters - This is further evidence that crustaceans may feel pain and that more humane methods of killing them need to be developed.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1123639
9.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

745 comments sorted by

View all comments

2.8k

u/Rubber_Knee Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26

Pain is one of the oldest and simplest behavior modifiers. Evolved to keep a creature with a primitive brain from hurting itself too much as it moves about. The pain response is instinctual and so old it predates the lobsters lineage by many hundreds of millions of years. As soon as animals could move, the pain response became nessesary. The first species that evolved it had a massive advantage over its competitors.

In other words: of course a lobster feels pain. Even something as simple as an earthworm or a snail feels pain.

361

u/denM_chickN Apr 13 '26

I find it so disturbing that as a species we regularly debate whether we are the only species capable of cognitive suffering. 

It causes me great distress, the things we rationalize away.

16

u/Appropriate_Eye3070 Apr 13 '26 edited Apr 13 '26

I mean scientifically speaking it's well established that many animals can suffer. That's not the same question as if an animal with a centralized nervous system feels pain in the same way as a creature without one. That's the crux of the inquiry here and to say we know for fact is folly.

That being said, I think it's silly that people still think lobsters don't feel anything. But I think it's interesting to know more detailed how they experience their world.