Insects feel persistent pain after injury, evidence suggests

As the link says, this research indicates that we can use insects to do basic research on Neuropathic pain. Insects, being easy and fast to breed, and easy to manage in large quantities, makes this especially useful for research.

Now they can try all sorts of methods of tackling the problem, from drugs to gene therapy.

It's not, of course, proof that successes will translate to mammal or human models, but it's an excellent way to do some initial concept filtering.

On the other hand, I've been dabbling with hydroponics. Most suggestions say to plant 2-3 seeds per growing block, so that you are protected against the risk of seeds not sprouting. If multiple seeds sprout, you just snip the tiny seedlings and leave the biggest, hardiest one to grow. A few days ago I killed 3 small seedlings and felt incredibly guilty. About a third of the way to crying over it. Next time I will only plant one seed per spot, even though that means I will get average plants instead of big ones, and it will take longer to replant seeds that don't sprout. The feeling of killing those beautiful young plants was just too much to bear.

On the other hand I have never felt bad for the millions of plants that have died to feed me.

Nature is a dog-eat-dog world. Ultimately we've got to kill to survive and to have a livable habitat. I had seen the spider I was hunting this morning walking around my window a few times over the last few weeks, but I left it alone until it bothered me. Sure, it's sad to kill another living being, but spiders are much less conscious than us and we've got to eventually rationalize the fact that a human is worth thousands of plants and spiders and bugs (if not, then the only logical action would be to commit suicide, unless you dedicated your life to saving plants and spiders and bugs). Even if you don't kill them directly, you do so indirectly by participating in our modern economy.

Tldr it sucks, too bad :(

I suggested that we need to just believe that we are more important than those dumb(er) lifeforms, but we should still avoid unnecessary killing whenever possible. Like not killing bugs/spiders unless they are actually annoying you, and not planting so many plants that you'll need to kill the extra ones.

I guess the plant example also showed that our sense of morality can be very illogical - the parent has qualms over hurting bugs, I really disliked killing plants needlessly, yet we all go and eat vegetables (and meat) every day, and our society has committed many, many genocides to nonhuman species.