Crustaceans with consciousness?

An almost below-the-radar declaration from New York points to a need for consideration of how we treat other animals, of pretty much every sort

Drawing inspired by the essay by David Foster Wallace. ©Perry Clark and Harrison Clark.

This past Friday, April 19, New York University hosted a one-day conference, The Emerging Science of Animal Consciousness. At the conclusion of the event, a group of 39 attendees announced the public release of The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, a statement signed by 39 scientists and academic philosophers, and almost as remarkable for its concision as for its content. It is only four very short paragraphs in length; the list of signees is longer than the body of the document. Its three key points: (1) there is strong scientific evidence in support of ‘the attribution of consciousness to other mammals and to birds’; (2) significant evidence can now reasonably be interpreted as indicating ‘at least a real possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects)’; and, as a conclusion based on (1) and (2), they give us (3) ‘when there is a realistic possibility of conscious experience in an animal, it is irresponsible to ignore that possibility in decisions affecting that animal.’

That some animals, such as chimpanzees, gorillas, dolphins, whales, dogs, parrots, and ravens, seem ‘conscious’ is nowadays not even old news—it’s commonly accepted. When the vet tells us that Rover is suffering separation anxiety and suggests a prescription of Prozac, the vet is in effect saying that the dog is recognizing that it, as conscious being, is separated from another being to which it is attached, and is upset by this separation. And we’re not shocked by the idea.

But snakes and lizards? Frogs? And ‘cephalopod mollusks’ and ‘decapod crustaceans’? Was the garter snake that bit me on the finger way back when genuinely ‘conscious’, or just reflexively responding to stimuli? The answers are, of course, complicated—if for no other reason than the fact that consciousness and our understanding of it and attempts to assess it are themselves complicated affairs. But there’s some interesting things to note about the animals in question. Cephalopod mollusks (e.g., octopi) have been known to actively seek escape from confinement, with occasionally ingenious methods leading to success. Bumblebees in research settings have been noted to do what looks like play with what are effectively bumble-bee-sized beach balls, rolling them around, pushing them, climbing on them, etc., with no reward offered, expected, or given. We’ll come to the crustaceans in a minute.

Like cosmology, wherein most theories (the scientific ones, anyway) start with some version of the Big Bang Theory, theories and models of consciousness begin simply, only to immediately blow up into one or more of the Big Hairy & Difficult Concepts that animate arguments late at night in college dorms and at all times of day, depending on schedules and the status of grant applications, in departments of biology and philosophy. See, e.g., Descartes, Liebniz, Hume, and Kant, all of whom described and occasionally espoused particular models of consciousness¹. I’ll choose Kant’s descriptions and classifications of consciousness as making as good a starting place for current discussion as anything else, if for no other reason than they are perhaps the most well known. I promise no deep dives.²

In hopes of keeping everyone’s head above water, I’ll refer interested readers to a not entirely unreasonable or confounding description of Kant’s philosophy of consciousness at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where we learn two things in our first at-bat: (1) ‘Philosophical discussions of consciousness typically focus on phenomenal consciousness, or “what it is like” to have a conscious experience of a particular kind, such as seeing the color red or smelling a rose,’ and (2), Kant didn’t much bother with metaphysical considerations of consciousness, which in turn suggests he might not have much useful to say about the existence, likelihood, or impossibility of consciousness in animals. But this last conjecture turns out to wrong, and in an interesting way. Kant basically denies the existence or possibility of consciousness in animals, but his reasoning, at least in the current age, proves a little shaky.

First, let’s recognize that, much as with many other discussions of consciousness in animals, the discussion at the NYU conference reportedly emphasized the typical philosophical focus on phenomenal consciousness, that ‘what it is like (to be an individual being of a particular form or kind)’ kind of thing. Thus it is a subjective affair, and intrinsically individualistic, at least for humans. But one can also emphasize the experiential nature of phenomenal consciousness—that being that it is the experiences an individual being undergoes in relations—heck, let’s call ‘em phenomena—with the world, others, etc.

When we watch others react to stimuli they receive from the world, we’re witnessing external manifestations of their overall responses to those stimuli; it’s these phenomena that constitute the tableau for the experience of this form of consciousness. When we see other animals, such as puppies, porpoises, and parrots, respond to stimuli in ways which are strikingly similar to ways in which humans often respond, it’s natural to wonder if Fido, Flipper³, and Frankie the African Grey experience consciousness. In their own subjective ways, of course, in response to phenomena as they experience them. Blah, blah, blah.

So, let’s ponder a decapod crustacean’s existence, particularly its experiential existence in relation to the world. More specifically, á la David Foster Wallace and his famous essay, let us Consider the Lobster. The Maine lobster, Homarus americanus, is familiar fare to Americans coast to coast, thanks to Red Lobster™ restaurants, where consumers of large malacostracans can pick their own living red decapod from a large glass-walled tank and have the creature boiled and served with butter minutes later. Wallace tells us how we can also boil our own lobsters at home, with a recipe even Barney Fife could follow. One of the keys is this: ‘A detail so obvious that most recipes don’t even bother to mention it is that [the] lobster is supposed to be alive when you put it in the kettle [of boiling water].’

This leads Wallace to pose what he and I agree is the ‘question that’s all but unavoidable’ when it comes to cooking lobster: ‘Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?’

There we have one small facet of the consciousness in animals conundrum. Granted, Wallace doesn’t declare that lobsters have consciousness, but sentience (the ability to experience feelings) seems pretty darn close, and the New York Times Word of the Day for October 11, 2023 was ‘sentience’. Definition number 1: ‘state of having consciousness’. Not really much room for quibbling. But on what basis did Wallace make that statement?

He acknowledges that ‘questions of whether and how . . . animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult. And comparative neuroanatomy is only part of the problem.’ Wallace then proceeds to briefly discuss the challenges inherent in understanding much at all about the feelings/sensations experienced by animals with which we don’t share linguistic modes of communication.

It is the close consideration of the process of cooking—er, excuse me, preparing the lobster for consumption—that really should give any non-sociopath/psychopath meaningful pause. As a lobster is introduced to the boiling maelstrom of water in which its feelings and sensations and experience thereof will soon cease, it tends, as Wallace puts it, ‘to come alarmingly to life’. The lobster will try to climb away from the pot of boiling water, even trying to grab hold, somehow, of the container from which it’s being dumped, or trying to hook its claws over the edge of the pot. Even once in the boiling water, the horror show doesn’t immediately cease. Persons near the kettle can typically hear the animal scraping the sides, banging at the lid, and generally thrashing about. That is, the lobster behaves pretty much as we would expect any creature with consciousness of itself and its environment to do. (Minus the screams, thankfully, since lobsters are non-vocal creatures. If the kitchens of every Red Lobster restaurant were routinely drenched in screams of agony emanating from animals being boiled to death, I have to think the company’s bottom line would likely suffer a bit. And that’s without the costs of the PTSD therapy for kitchen and wait staff, managers, customers, and unwitting delivery persons who happen to come through the door and hear triple-decibel crustacean screams of pain. Just imagine the PETA videos.)

Now back to Kant. I can allow for no doubt that IK was very much aware of the ability of animals to perceive sensations or feelings in response to stimuli from the world in which they exist. Dear Immanuel even goes so far as to say that animals can form ‘representations’ of things at what he called a dunkel level of perception and processing; the German dunkel is often translated as obscure. I like ‘murky’, but either probably suffices. This obscure/murky perception processing IK sees as occurring in a ‘disunified’, unconscious level of mental activity. Though animals can form these representations of phenomena, they lack the cognitive ability to understand, and thus, cannot be said to be actually conscious of the world—the sort of apprehension of the world through perceived and understood phenomena is restricted to humans, per IK.

With the increased recognition that at least some ‘higher’ animals—e.g., apes, toothed whales, and some others—seem to have cognitive abilities of the sort that would seem to allow for something we humans might rightly call ‘understanding’, for many of us in the genus Homo, the roster of conscious animals is expanding. Dolphins, orcas, gorillas, organutans. Even some birds, such as ravens, crows, and at least some parrots. Possession of ‘higher’, i.e., cortical/cognitive brain organization and ability seems to allow for something that in turn we recognize as consciousness. Kant would maybe even agree that Flipper really understands some of the representations her mind was making, and thus was conscious of both herself, the world, and the various relations/phenomena thereof.

But hold on. Is ‘understanding’ actually necessary? Or if it is, at what level of brain functioning does understanding first and most elementally occur? Do we even know? One thing we do know is that one doesn’t need much help from ‘higher’ brain centers in order to perceive and be distressed by pain, or joyed by pleasure. These things suffuse our mental states without a whole lot of what we call ‘thinking’ going on. In fact, probably none at all. To further complicate matters, there’s this: When we do think of pain, or pleasure, how well do we understand it? Can we even make the claim that we always do, in some meaningful way, understand these phenomena? And if there are occasions wherein we most definitely do not understand them, are we somehow less conscious of them? Does their obscurity or murkiness make them less meaningful, less important, to us and our existence? If not, do we wish to concede that understanding is necessary for consciousness?

It’s already widely conceded by neurologists, psychologists, philosophers, and the hot dog vendor with his cart, that people in general go through their days not really taking in, at a conscious level, some innumerably large number of phenomena which the world imposes upon us or presents to us. And of those we apprehend at what we call a conscious level, does this cognitive recognition actually and reliably produce understanding? Based on the behaviors with which we respond, it’s not hard to make a case that our understanding is often incomplete or faulty, if not an outright fantasy or illusion—which, of course, is a not uncommon contention amongst modern philosophers—that all we perceive, and all our understanding thereof, is illusory. À la Nietzsche, to some degree.

Which brings another Big Question: Are humans, from any suitably rational perspective (assuming for the moment that we even know what a ‘suitably rational perspective’ looks like), actually reliable and appropriate arbiters for what creatures can be deemed to have consciousness? Or are we just being speciously speciesist about the whole thing, contriving in yet another way to put ourselves above all other, instead of recognizing our membership within the great and noisy mass of living things?

Most of us, on encountering anxious or fearful individuals, experience first an urge to aid and comfort. We recognize that fear and anxiety are unpleasant, and significantly detrimental to our ‘lived experience’. Put that fear and anxiety into a helpless babe, a puppy, a nestling bird, or a baby bunny, and we almost can’t help ourselves from both feeling an urge to care and then acting upon said urge. (Often, unfortunately, to the detriment of the nestling/fledgling bird or the young bunny, who are generally better left to the attentions of their proper parents. <sigh> Good intentions, roads to hell, all that.) One can argue that we’re basically hard-wired to perceive anxiety-like behavior as disturbing. Which brings us back to decapod crustaceans.

When we pick the lobster that is to be our dinner from those in the tank at the restaurant, said lobster almost always comes with beefy rubber bands securing the massive front claws shut. Not just to keep the cook’s fingers from unpleasantness, but in order to keep the lobsters from fighting each other. Lobsters and their kin can be territorial, and, when stressed, prone to fighting. They can even eat each other, if circumstances are suitably propitious.

The Louisiana red crayfish, aka the red swamp crayfish, Louisiana crawfish, bayou crawfish, and many other names, is the lead ingredient of the crawfish gumbo and similar dishes New Orleans and the State of Louisiana have made famous. Procambarus clarkii (no relation to yours truly) is to crayfish consumption what the Maine lobster is to lobster eating. There are other options, but all are just that, options to the usual, the commonly assumed. The red crayfish also shares with Maine lobster the fact that both are fondly referred to as ‘bugs’ by the locals. (In the American northeast, lobsters are called simply ‘bugs’; down in the swamp-and-bayou country of Louisiana, crayfish are called ‘mudbugs’. Whether this affects one’s culinary enjoyment appears to be highly variable and personal.)

In order to look at the possibility of harassment, anxiety, fear, etc. in a ‘lower’ animal, a quartet of neuroscientists at the Institut de Neurosciences Cognitives et Intégratives d’Aquitaine at the University of Bordeaux, France, looked at the behavior of pairs of male crayfish (our friends, Procambarus clarkii) matched for size/weight when forced to share a small tank.⁴ The dyads (fancy-shmancy scientific jargon for ‘pairs’) were concomitantly placed into an aquarium new to each, and the scientists got some popcorn and watched the fights. What they saw was striking. After a few moments of reconnoitering their new digs, the two males faced off and began to fight. Following some impressive clawing, battering, thumping, banging, etc., inevitably one of the two decided they weren’t gonna win, and so suddenly bailed out of the fight with a sudden backwards-driving tail flick and scurried away, ceasing their aggressive behavior. This left the other member of the dyad as the victor. What did the victor do? It continued to attack and harass the loser, which kept retreating, running away, and trying to hide. Finally, after a total of twenty minutes of introductions/face-off/fighting/retreat/harassment, the two were removed from the aquarium and placed into separate tanks. Even in those separate tanks, however, the winners and losers continued to display different behaviors. Winners were much more likely to strut about the new space in the well-lit open; losers were generally prone to seeking out darker areas of the new space in which to hide. The researchers called the loser crawfish’s doings ‘anxiety-like behavior’ (ALB)—not wanting to declare it actual anxiety until there was convincing evidence, or Mel Brooks got involved.

So what they did for the next series of crawfish fisticuffs was intended to address the hypothesis that the ALB was as much or more real anxiety as anxiety-like: when each fight was over, and the loser was being moved to a separate aquarium, they injected the losing crawfish with chlordiazepoxide, which you might recall better as Librium, which Uncle Dave used to take to ameliorate his alcohol withdrawal. Used, in other words, to treat anxiety and anxiety-like behaviors in humans. And it snuffed out the ALB in the crayfish. This not being enough for your good neuroscientist to reach (publishable) conclusions, they went on and obtained brain tissue samples from both winners and losers, and found notably higher levels of a stress-related neurotransmitter (specifically, 5-hydroxytryptamine [5-HT], aka serotonin) in the losers’ brains. This giving them a marker they could reliably measure, and potentially muck with, they of course decided to do some mucking with the stress responses of the mudbugs. For a yet another round of crayfish dyad duels they injected both with methysergide, a serotonin antagonist now only rarely used in humans due to possibility of unpleasant side effects of a serious nature, but cheap and effective. And the methysergide also effectively reduced the ALB of loser crawdads. In their conclusion, the neuroscientists noted that their findings consistently pointed to the manifestation of anxiety-like behaviors in crawfish exposed to significant social stress and harassment, which ALB in turn could be ameliorated by drugs used to reduce anxiety and related behaviors in humans and other animals. Anxiety in harassed crawdads? It sure looks that way. And given what we already knew about lobsters and their reactions to the prospect of being boiled alive, not as surprising as it might otherwise have been.

For a conclusion here, I suppose we should consider trying to answer the question: Do we have enough evidence suggesting that even ‘lower’ animals like crustaceans and insects might possibly have consciousness of sufficiently developed nature that we should be thinking seriously about how we treat them? I think the authors and signees of the New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness have it about right. Now . . . if one agrees, what does reasonable action in response look like? It’s one thing to wring hands and express worry, and another thing to order lunch.

1. I can’t help but note that this is where Nietzsche goes bust, and thus why he’s omitted from the (admittedly extremely abbreviated) list of philosophers with something interesting to say about consciousness. Dear old Frederick Wilhelm spins vague concepts of consciousness around like toy tops on a table, enjoying their collisions and crashes to the floor, and ultimately declares consciousness to be illusory, superficial, and even a form of falsification or lie-creation. What he does not do is articulate a useful model of what seems a necessary, even vital bit of functioning of that thing we call mind. FWN clearly has his fans and adherents these days, but I’m not one of them, at least with regards to his thoughts on consciousness. There’s lots to be said about FWN and modern philosophy and thought, and particularly about the grotesqueries that have been formed of the clay he left lying about, and acknowledgement that his harvest wasn’t entirely chaff, but all that must wait for another time. Meanwhile, it’s only fair to recognize that others also struggled. John Stuart Mill made a muddle of things, declaring a notion of self a ‘construct’ based on sensations, thus confusing himself in the process of explaining his own thought, and that giant of twentieth century philosophy, Martin Heidegger, fudged the whole thing with a reverse end-run, declaring humans to have Dasein (German: translation: existence, or being), an ‘experience of being’ unique to humans, for Heidegger an amped-up form of being that necessarily includes examination of one’s self and one’s particular and authentic existence within the world, but something above simple consciousness. A consciousness-plus, maybe? Or simply the first nausea-inducing use of ‘authentic’? Opinions vary.

2. Serious consideration of any possibility of consciousness, of a sort we modern hominids can grasp, is found ultimately to require multiple excursions, each comprising significant time at significant depth and a mental equivalent of staged decompression. And even then one finds that thorough understanding of human consciousness—just as a starting point for future comparison, of course—is unachievable, through inabilities to achieve the depths necessary if no more. Then one is left with trying to ascertain the extent to which our rudimentary and conflicting models and opinions might rightly apply to individuals of other species. I can’t be sure that my next door neighbor is conscious of existence (his own and/or that of anyone or anything else) in a way I understand or experience; multiply the barriers and difficulties by a factor of some high-order power of x, with no really good idea what x even is, and one begins to comprehend nature of the problem. But that doesn’t mean we can’t recognize glimpses of consciousness when the circumstances are just so, sort of like the ‘green flash’ of a sunset, itself so rarely seen. Or is the very notion that one can recognize consciousness in some other entity a wish/fear/projection/fantasy? One is sometimes tempted to finish Descartes’ thought: ‘I think, therefore I am confused.’ [Cue Socrates: A gentle smile and a nod.]

3. Yes, I know that Flipper was not a porpoise, but instead a Common (or Atlantic) Bottlenose Dolphin (Tursiops truncatus). Allowances for alliteration, please. Actually, if we’re gonna be picky, the role of Flipper was portrayed at any given point in the relevant time frame and on set of either the 1963 movie or the TV series running from 1964-7, by one of several trained Bottlenose Dolphins (almost always females) performing for the camera. For the movie, a female named Mitzi was the “lead” dolphin, with a few others being stand-ins, back-ups, and understudies. The TV show used five female dolphins to portray Flipper: Susie (the lead), Kathy, Patty, Scotty, and Squirt. Well, except for the tail-walk bits: a male named Clown was used there, as a more reliable performer of that maneuver. Just, well, work with me here. And unless you can tell us the significant differences between dolphins and porpoises, I’m gonna throw a flag for Unwarranted and Unsubstantiated Pedantry. So let’s move on.

4. The article, from Bacqué-Cazenave et al, entitled ‘Social harassment induces anxiety-like behaviour in crayfish’, is Open Access, published in Nature Publishing Group’s Scientific Reports. And it really deserves more than 32 citations, though it does have some issues with clarity and organization.