Lab rats have rights. Before they can experiment with the animals, researchers in the United States must obtain approval from committees that certify compliance with federal regulations regarding shelter and compassionate handling of animals. The same thing applies to scientists working with mice, monkeys, fish or finches.
These protected animals have one thing in common: a spinal column.
But invertebrate animals used in research laboratories, including worms, bees or cephalopods such as squid and octopus, do not enjoy the same protections from the federal government. With the increasing frequency with which researchers are working with cephalopods to seek answers to questions in neuroscience and other areas, the question of compassionate treatment of animals is gaining urgency.
Governments in Europe and Australia have already included these intelligent invertebrate animals in their legislation. But in the United States, said neuroscientist Robyn Crook of San Francisco State University, “if you’re in research and you want to buy some octopuses and do whatever you want with them, there’s no regulatory oversight to stop you.”
This does not mean that the area of ​​cephalopod research is a Wild West. Increasingly, American research institutes are choosing to submit their cephalopod studies to the same approval process used in experiments with mice or other vertebrates. But the lack of treatment criteria for cephalopods to guide their decisions, coupled with the absence of federal oversight to back them up, reflects the way rules and laws lag behind the scientific understanding of the animals’ complex inner lives.
Like a lab mouse, an octopus can learn to navigate a maze. Octopuses can also perform clever feats that rats cannot, such as disguising themselves as rocks or snakes, escaping from a pond, or hiding inside coconut shells.
In 2021, University of Cambridge biologist Alexandra Schnell and others discovered that squid can pass a version of the marshmallow test, a famous measure of self-control in human psychology. Cephalopods resist the temptation to eat a piece of shrimp for up to two minutes in order to get an even better snack (a larger, live shrimp).
Unlike humans — whose intelligence is all located in the head, so to speak — octopuses carry most of their nervous system in their arms. Your suction cups don’t just cling to things, they feel and taste them. “It’s like our hands are lined with tongues,” explained biologist Christine Huffard of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
In a scientific paper published in July, Huffard and Peter Morse, from James Cook University in Australia, showed that male blue-ringed octopuses can use touch to recognize females they have mated with. After bumping into an ex-partner, the males would flee, possibly to avoid being devoured. This research suggests that octopuses and other cephalopods are intelligent and sensitive.
But do they feel pain like we do? It is not a purely hypothetical concern. Some cephalopod research involves potentially dangerous surgeries, such as amputating an octopus arm. However, we cannot ask octopuses if it hurts.
“The possibility that the experience of pain exists in animals that are not vertebrates is a controversial idea,” Crook said. In a 2021 scientific paper, she showed that octopuses that received an injection of acetic acid caressed the wound with their beak and avoided staying in a chamber where they had been after receiving the injection. But the octopuses had enjoyed being in a chamber where they were given a numbing injection after the first injection.
Researchers used a similar rodent test to assess whether drugs can cause them pain. “We suggest that octopuses feel and are able to feel the same thing,” Crook said.
In another scientific paper from 2021, she and her co-authors studied the nerve activity of octopuses and squids that had been anesthetized — or so the scientists thought. They had dipped the animals in magnesium chloride to anesthetize them, a common procedure in laboratories. When an animal stopped moving and turned white, scientists assumed it was stunned and would not be stressed when handled. But readings from electrodes showed that for several minutes after it stopped reacting, the cephalopod could still feel the scientists touching its body.
Crook said the discovery immediately changed the way researchers in his lab anesthetized octopuses. Today they wait up to 20 minutes longer to make sure the animals don’t feel anything. She hopes that other labs have also changed their practice.
Who is responsible for the welfare of captive animals? In the United States, the answer is complicated.
The Animal Welfare Act, passed in 1966, requires that animals such as primates and dogs and cats kept as pets receive compassionate treatment. The law does not apply to farm animals, race horses, invertebrates, fish, rats or laboratory mice. Another law, the Health Research Extension Act of 1985, governs the treatment of all vertebrate animals in US government-funded research.
Both laws require universities and other research institutions to have an Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, or IACUC. The committees must include at least one veterinarian and one person not affiliated with the institution. Before starting a research project, scientists must submit a proposal to their institution’s committee, which in turn must ensure that the scientist’s plan complies with federal guidelines.
“I think it works well,” said Steve Niemi, a laboratory animal veterinarian and director of the Center for Animal Science at Boston University. “This is a highly contentious area that is closely monitored” in the case of vertebrate animals, he said.
Niemi said critics have pointed out that animal care committees rarely fail to approve requests from researchers. But in his experience, this is because committees discuss projects extensively with scientists, revising their plan until it is acceptable. “For me,” he said, “our mission is to enable research responsibly.”
As scientists discover more about the cephalopods’ intelligence and their perception of pain, Niemi said, “it will be up to us, ethically speaking, to consider whether and how to include them in our local oversight.”
Many universities are already voluntarily asking their committees to review cephalopod research. According to Crook, this trend has been gaining momentum over the past couple of years.
Nor is there a universal cephalopod care manual, because scientists are still just learning about the biology of these animals. If a researcher violated his agreement with the committee, for example, there would be no legal way to prevent his experiment from being carried out.
“In some ways, it’s make-believe regulation,” Crook said.
As universities and other research institutions try to enforce a non-existent law on their cephalopods, Katherine Meyer, director of the Animal Law and Policy Clinic at the Harvard School of Law, is trying to pressure the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the main source of federal funding. of biomedical research in the US, to change that.
In 2020, Meyer’s clinic asked the NIH’s Office of Laboratory Animal Welfare to regulate cephalopod research. “I just thought we need to do something to protect the octopuses,” she said.
Meyer realized that while the Health Research Extension Act of 1985 deals with the care of “animals used in research,” it does not define what an animal is. The definition of animals as “living vertebrate” creatures is contained in another NIH document.
“That’s when I saw the opening,” Meyer said. She said the NIH’s office for lab animals could protect octopuses and the like by simply changing the definition of “animals” to encompass cephalopods, rather than amending the underlying law.
It received a response in July 2020, saying the agency “is aware of the standards followed in other countries that include cephalopods in animal welfare enforcement and regulation” and is “considering options to provide guidance on compassionate treatment and use.” of invertebrates in NIH-funded research”.
Other than that, she said, “we haven’t received any concrete response from the agency.”
Responding to a request for statements, an NIH spokesperson repeated the text of the letter sent to Meyer.
Huffard said that, in the absence of new federal guidelines, many international scientific journals require US researchers to provide evidence that they have submitted cephalopod research to the IACUC or other institutional review process before their research can be published.
An animal welfare NGO called AAALAC International, which offers voluntary accreditation to research institutions, is also recommending that institutional committees have to approve cephalopod research.
Octopuses are very complex animals; no one has any doubt about it. But are they the most complex invertebrates? Depends on how you define it. If people studied sea centipedes the way they study octopuses, they would be amazed at how intelligent they are.
“I don’t know of any cephalopod researchers who ignore these rules,” Huffard said. While the US government has not determined that cephalopods deserve the same protections as other animals, scientists who study these many-armed animals have already made that determination themselves.
“A sick or stressed octopus is not going to yield useful data,” Huffard said. And even without considering the data, he added, “I want the animals to be happy and healthy.”
However, said Huffard, if we are rethinking the way our laws privilege vertebrate animals, it might not make sense to value cephalopods more than other invertebrate species. “Octopuses are very complex animals; no one doubts that,” she said. “But are invertebrates more complex? Depends on how you define it.”
Bees, for example, have very complex behaviors and social structures. The British government recently declared that crabs and lobsters are sentient, and in Switzerland it is illegal to boil a live lobster. “If people studied sea centipedes the way they study octopuses, they would be amazed at how smart they are,” Huffard said.
“I think we should treat all animals with that level of respect.”
Translation by Clara Allain
