Developing and validating an acoustic system as a tool to assess welfare conditions for farmed insects

Farming insects for food and feed raises unique welfare challenges. Despite growing evidence that insects may be sentient they are not protected by any UK animal welfare legislation or welfare-focused best practice guidelines. There is a lack of basic knowledge about the welfare implications of industry practices

Insect-specific welfare indicators need to be validated to test welfare hypotheses. However, existing indicators are either insufficiently sensitive (e.g., mortality) or impractical on farms (e.g., cognitive bias). As such, welfare scientists and industry cannot effectively compare insect welfare between different industry-scale housing and husbandry systems. To address these issues, any new welfare indicator need to work in real-time; require minimal staff effort; avoid stressing the insects by disrupting their rearing trays; and generalise across different high- and low- welfare conditions.

One promising insect welfare indicator is acoustics.  This project is a proof-of-concept collaboration between business and universities to develop and validate a new technology-based welfare metric. It aims to develop a prototype acoustic system and use machine learning and big data-driven approaches to identify any common acoustic signatures of welfare conditions for BSFL. The research is utilising the industry-scale insect farm based at University’s research farm.