Can Insects Feel Pain? New Research Suggests That Crickets Do

Used for food, feed and research, the critters are among the most widely farmed bugs. The study authors say humans should work to reduce harm in insect farming, handling and experimentation

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

May 18, 2026 12:00 p.m.

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Can crickets feel pain? New research suggests these ubiquitous bugs may experience “pain-like” sensations, adding to the growing list of nonhuman species that seem to feel lingering discomfort.

Until now, most research on insect pain has focused on bees, which have been observed grooming their injuries. But this time, scientists decided to focus on house crickets (Acheta domesticus), yellowish-brown bugs that are “reared by the millions for food, feed and research, often under conditions that assume an absence of felt experience,” researchers write in a study published May 13 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

“If they’re capable of having better and worse lives, then we should take that into consideration,” study co-author Thomas White, an entomologist at the University of Sydney, in Australia, tells the Guardian’s Petra Stock.

Studying pain is challenging, because it’s a subjective experience. It’s even more difficult to investigate among nonhuman creatures, who cannot describe what they’re feeling—at least not in a language we can currently understand—or rate the intensity on a scale from zero to ten.

So to understand whether creatures can feel pain, scientists often look to their behavior. They specifically search for signs of “flexible self-protection,” such as grooming or cradling a certain area of the body. Over time, research has shown that numerous nonhuman species, including invertebrates like crabs, octopuses, cockroaches and mosquitoes, seem to feel pain.

Against this backdrop, White and his colleagues bought 80 commercially reared adult crickets—evenly split between males and females—from a pet supply company, then housed them in a university laboratory. One by one, they used a sponge to gently immobilize the crickets, then subjected each to three treatment conditions in random order.

In one condition, scientists touched a soldering iron heated to 149 degrees Fahrenheit—hot enough to be potentially painful without causing lasting tissue damage—to a single antenna for five seconds. In another, they used an unheated soldering iron. And, in the control condition, they handled the cricket the same way but did not use the soldering iron.

After each treatment, the scientists filmed the crickets’ behavior for ten minutes. Later, observers who were unaware of which condition the bugs had been subjected to watched the footage and made notes about the critters’ behaviors.

In the unheated probe and control conditions, the crickets tended to groom both antennae equally. But in the heated condition, the bugs “overwhelmingly” focused on the injured side, White tells the Guardian. “They weren’t just agitated and flustered,” he adds. “They were directing their attention to the actual [antenna] that was hit with this hot probe.”

After exposure to the high temperature, the crickets were more than twice as likely to groom the affected antenna as after exposure to the cool soldering iron, the team found. The insects also spent roughly four times longer tending to the burned appendage than they did in the control condition.

The findings didn’t surprise the researchers. However, they recognize that the results might be surprising to some people, simply because insects are so different from humans.

“We readily accept that other people feel pain by reading cues in their behavior, like the inspection and nursing of an injury,” White and study co-author Kate Lynch, a philosopher and biologist at the University of Sydney, write for the Conversation. “We extend this to some animals too—a dog licking its paw or a cat favoring a limb rightly stir our sympathies. But what happens when we turn that lens on animals far less like us?”

Even though insects are estimated to make up to 90 percent of all animal species, “the default view of the vast majority of the general public, as well as many of my colleagues, is that insects are largely reflex machines,” Lars Chittka, a behavioral biologist at Queen Mary University of London, told the New Yorker’s Shayla Love last year. As Love writes, “insects are small, they don’t scream or bleed red and many are considered pests; we tend to kill or mutilate them without pause.”

Kate Umbers, a zoologist at Western Sydney University and the managing director of Invertebrates Australia, who was not involved with the research, echoes that sentiment, telling the Guardian that humans are “notoriously” bad at appreciating creatures that differ significantly from them.

Still, Umbers says she hopes the paper will “inspire people to look past the differences between humans and insects, and instead embrace empathy that they naturally feel towards other living things.” At the very least, she adds, the findings might challenge people to “think more carefully about the way we interact with these species—and to not reach for the bug spray.”

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.