So when Abie came home from school in 2017 and announced that he wanted to donate a kidney to a stranger, the 17-year-old’s pronouncement took his normally even-keeled mother off-guard.

“I’m donating my kidney to a stranger,” Abie told her.

While Perlman was tickled by her son’s altruism, she couldn’t stop her Mom Brain from kicking into overdrive. Wasn’t the surgery dangerous? Didn’t Abie need both kidneys? What would happen decades from now? And what could possibly motivate someone to undergo major surgery for a complete stranger?

Since 2000, the number of living organ donors in the U.S. has remained relatively stagnant at around 6,000 to 6,500 annually, even as the kidney transplant waitlist has grown to nearly 100,000 in that same time. Most of these donors give to family or friends — only around 3% of living donations are undirected and go to total strangers.

What makes kidneys from living donors especially valuable is that these organs generally last several years longer than a cadaver kidney. The shortage of available kidneys is intensified by the complexities of finding a donor with a compatible immune system profile to reduce the chances of rejection.

Although the actual surgery is generally safe and commonplace, would-be kidney donors also face a range of barriers and requirements, depending on the transplant centers. Many are medical; anything less than A+ health is disqualifying, Rosamond Rhodes, a bioethicist at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, told me. Across the board, it’s clear: You must be in good mental and physical health. Other barriers are practical. Donors must take time off work for testing, surgery and recovery. They need transportation to and from the hospital. Then there are incidentals like food and parking. It all adds up. These hurdles may explain why only 300 to 400 Americans each year donate a kidney to a stranger, Perlman said.

Her son’s experience donating a kidney at New York City’s NYU Langone hospital in 2019 led Perlman to do the same six months later. As she learned more about America’s — and the world’s — kidney shortage, she began to champion an idea that some in the medical community find morally repugnant: compensating living kidney donors for their act.

Perlman has been the driving force behind a bill called the “End Kidney Deaths Act,” which was introduced to the House by a bipartisan group of lawmakers in late summer 2024 and would primarily provide tax breaks as a form of compensation to individuals who gave undirected living kidney donors. The amount, $50,000 over five years, is meant to not only allow donors to recoup lost wages but also as a token of appreciation for a selfless act, Perlman said. Economists arrived at the number through a series of studies that worked to balance the money saved through a transplant rather than ongoing dialysis treatment, public opinion on the value of kidneys from living donors, and a monetary amount persuasive enough to incentivize potential donors to step up to the plate.

“Donation, I recognize very clearly, is work. It’s time consuming, it’s painful, it’s stressful work. If you just compensate people for what they’ve done, you will have a far greater impact,” Perlman told me.

Economically speaking, Frank McCormick, a retired economist and former director of economic and financial research at Bank of America, told me the proposal is a slam dunk. Ethically, however, not everyone is convinced. A prohibition against selling organs has been a medical mainstay for decades. Dr. Gabriel Danovitch, the now-retired director of the University of California, Los Angeles’ Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Program, sees donor compensation as a slippery slope to back-alley surgeries and black-market organ auctions. And when so much money is on the line, will patients be as honest about their medical histories with the transplant team?

“If you’re donating a kidney to someone you care about, you’re going to tell the truth,” Danovitch said. “But if you’re doing it because you need some money, well, why would you necessarily?”

Danovitch’s revulsion at the idea of potential patient coercion and organ trafficking is shared by everyone in the transplant world. But the End Kidney Deaths Act isn’t setting up some sort of Silk Road for kidneys, McCormick told me. Instead, providing tax breaks for donors shows that society values what they do. It’s no different than paying doctors and nurses their salaries for performing the transplant.

“This is a shortage that is killing people,” McCormick said. “More than 40,000 people each year are suffering on dialysis unnecessarily and dying prematurely.”

Whether the bill will pass under the new administration remains to be seen, but if it became law, the U.S. would join the ranks of only a few other countries — Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel — that permit payments to living donors. It’s a bold step, as well as one fraught with ethical complications. 

Anatomy Of A Transplant

Ever since Dr. Joseph Murray removed Ronald Herrick’s kidney and placed it into the abdomen of his 23-year-old identical twin brother, Richard, in 1954, organ transplants have been saving lives. The development of immunosuppressant medications such as cyclosporine and tacrolimus opened the world of transplant to others, beyond identical twins. This lifesaving achievement had limitations, however, as the number of individuals needing a transplant has always outstripped the number of organs available.

What makes kidney transplants different, Perlman told me, is that living people can donate with no long-term ill effects. Our kidneys filter toxins from our blood, yes, but they also ensure the correct balance of water, electrolytes, salts and essential minerals in our bodies. They’re so vital that our kidneys have far more capacity than we really need. Many of those born with unilateral renal agenesis — a rare condition where a person only develops a single kidney — never even know they have it. A single kidney, then, is generally adequate for normal physical functioning.  It’s not until kidney function drops dangerously low to about 15% that individuals develop serious symptoms of kidney failure. 

But just because someone has excess kidney capacity doesn’t mean they’re a candidate to relinquish their spare parts. Common conditions such as diabetes and hypertension are a leading cause of kidney failure, which rules out many would-be donors. Heart disease, cancer and obesity can all exclude donors. Even high risk of developing these conditions in the future is enough to keep someone from donating. If the rules sound stringent, that’s because they are, Dr. Arthur Matas, a transplant surgeon at the University of Minnesota Medical School, told me.

“In order to be a kidney donor, you need to essentially be perfectly healthy with no chronic diseases, except maybe something like acne or asthma,” he said.

Physicians like Matas helped craft these rules over the decades to protect donors from unforeseen health consequences down the road. Should an unforeseen health crisis occur, these donors are typically placed at the top of the transplant list.

“You’re taking somebody to the operating room who doesn’t need an operation for their own physical benefit, so you want to do absolutely everything to minimize risk,” Matas said. Long-term studies show that living kidney donors show minimal increased risk for future disease even decades after their kidney was removed. Donor screening was rigorous enough to ensure that the donors were unlikely to develop conditions that would have a detrimental impact on their remaining kidney function.

The other challenge for physicians is ensuring the new kidney isn’t rejected by the recipient’s immune system. All our cells are studded with sugary proteins called human leukocyte antigens that act as molecular “Hello My Name is” stickers that our immune system reads to determine if the cell it encounters is from our own body or a pathogen. Our name tags are controlled by genetics, which means that a parent, child or sibling is much more likely to have a cell signature similar to our own (only identical twins would have virtually the same molecular name tags on their cells). If patrolling immune cells stumble upon a name tag that isn’t ours, they will attack the intruder.

Immunosuppressant medications can dampen this response, but they can’t eliminate it. A donor kidney with a more familiar name tag is crucial for the organ to last long term. Without an adequate match, even a kidney from an exceptionally healthy and willing donor isn’t of much use.

In the early 2000s, Stanford economist Alvin Roth realized that matching a donor kidney to its recipient wasn’t just a medical question, it was an economic one. Instead of sending a donor-recipient pair away because of an immunological mismatch, Roth helped develop a system of kidney exchanges. This allows recipients with incompatible donors to swap kidneys to create the ultimate win-win scenario. It goes something like this: say Wife A wants to donate to Husband B, and Father C wants to donate to Daughter D, but neither is a good match. Instead, Wife A donates to Daughter D and Father C donates to Husband B — both better matches here — and everyone wins.

“You’re looking for combinations that yield lots of good transplants,” Roth said.

The strategy seemed like such an obvious solution, Roth told me, but it took an act of Congress to make the idea legal. The 1984 National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) established the framework of the modern American transplant system. It also included a provision that prohibited any exchange of “valuable consideration” for a human organ for transplantation. This terminology made it illegal to buy or sell human organs. What no one could answer with any certainty was whether a kidney donation chain counted as valuable consideration, since the organs were exchanged outside of strict donor-recipient pairs. It wasn’t until 2007 that Congress officially amended NOTA to allow for donation chains. The longest of these chains at a single site started in 2013 and currently spans over 100 people at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Even the Nobel Prize committee agreed with the importance of donation chains, awarding Roth and Lloyd Shapley the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.” But Roth’s idea hasn’t made much of a dent in the transplant waitlist.

“We do more than 1,000 kidney exchange transplants a year in the United States now. That’s a good thing, but it’s not enough to end the shortage of kidneys,” Roth said.

Some in the transplant community saw the ongoing problem as one of economics, in which demand far outstripped supply. To people like McCormick, the solution was simple: pay people to donate their kidneys.

As someone who has browsed both eBay and Facebook Marketplace, I have seen people put a price tag on pretty much everything. Everything from dusty yearbooks and Beanie Babies to antique vases and endangered turtles (despite prohibitive rules) can be bought and sold with the click of a button. The prices of such items are often governed by the elusive laws of supply and demand. A high-demand, low-supply item, such as an original Picasso, commands staggering prices. The inverse — a low-demand and high-supply item— causes the value to plummet (as evidenced by the job offers received by myself and other freelance writers).

McCormick learned these rules in Econ 101 and taught them to subsequent generations as a guest lecturer. The law of supply and demand, however, comes with a caveat: it only applies to an open market. Since the government forbids the sale of kidneys for transplant, it’s not an open market. As an economist for the Bank of America, he didn’t think much about how supply and demand applied to kidneys. McCormick didn’t even think they should be bought and sold. But as he prepared his lecture notes on price ceilings for an introductory economics lecture at the University of California, Berkeley, he asked a friend for examples that might be more relevant to younger students than 1970s price controls on gasoline. His friend asked, “What about kidneys?” 

Banning the sale of an item, be it a can of kidney beans or an entire functional kidney, imposes a price ceiling of $0. Everything fell into place in McCormick’s head with a sudden thunk. Kidneys were scarce because there was no market to buy and sell them. Create a market and you could reduce that deficit. 

“There’s a market for kidneys, just like there’s a market for everything else,” McCormick said. “Supply and demand apply to kidneys as well as everything else. And if you fool around and hold the price down, you’re asking for trouble, and trouble is what we have in spades.”

According to the rules of economics, then, McCormick reasoned, the most efficient way to increase kidney transplants is by simply paying donors. But to others in the transplant community, the issue was moral and medical, not economic. The world needs more organ donors, yes, but they argue that the solution isn’t to put a price tag on kidneys.

Navigating Potential Pitfalls

From an engineering standpoint, the kidneys are a physiological marvel. Even the world’s most advanced dialysis machines only recapture a portion of the kidney’s biological activity. The complexity of the fist-sized organs — along with the life-threatening complications when they fail — never ceases to amaze Danovitch. As a UCLA nephrologist, he helped hundreds of patients receive new kidneys and watched hundreds more die while waiting for a transplant. But Danovitch draws the line at compensating donors.

“It’s payment. It’s money,” he told me. “And it’s a disaster.”

Danovitch cites a laundry list of reasons why paying organ donors is fraught with moral hazard. In addition to incentivizing aspiring donors to conceal important and potentially disqualifying information, compensating donations solely to strangers could effectively strangle the far more common process of donating to a loved one. Why go through a painful surgery if you could just wait for someone else to donate for the $50k tax break? Most of all, the promise of payment is likely to be coercive; a person in desperate straits might do something they wouldn’t otherwise, just because they need the money. Danovitch cites news reports from around the world about impoverished people who sold a kidney to feed their families, keep a roof over their heads or pay for school. These potential downsides, paired with the urgent need for more donors, mean that physicians are constantly debating whether to compensate living donors.

“We’re always asking, ‘should we or shouldn’t we, should we or shouldn’t we,’ and the last thing we want is to say no because, after all, they’re going to be able to go to college now, or they’re going to make $50,000,” he said.

Our culture celebrates organ donors as heroes, Danovitch said, recalling a flight attendant’s look of joy when she told Danovitch of her own experience donating a kidney to a friend. When fellow passengers overheard what the flight attendant had done, they treated her to a round of applause.

“It’s like a halo effect,” Danovitch told me. Selling kidneys would change that.

All of which might be true. But many of us might prefer the $50k. Haloes, after all, don’t put gas in the car or food on the table. The fact that Danovitch got paid to perform transplant surgeries doesn’t make his efforts any less lifesaving, nor does it mean you can’t get the warm fuzzies inside from doing a worthwhile job, Matas, the transplant surgeon, noted.

Matas also argues that seemingly altruistic decisions such as donating a kidney to a friend or family member nonetheless have value to the donor. They might be able to enjoy more years with a spouse, child or friend. Just because the benefit isn’t monetary doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, he said.

Nor is it any of our concern how a potential paid donor might choose to spend their funds, Rhodes said. Maybe they want money for college or to pay for a cancer drug, or maybe to start a business or travel the world. 

“People’s motivations are their own business,” Rhodes said. “I shouldn’t be the one to judge their acceptability.”

For Andreas Brøgger Albertsen, a philosopher and political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark, the moral dilemma is more subtle. Why, he asked me, have we created a culture in which people feel that selling a kidney is the best economic option? This doesn’t mean that the U.S. shouldn’t modify NOTA, nor that it’s a bad idea. However, he said, there’s a danger in turning “donate a kidney” into a “get out of poverty” scheme.

“This proposal will interact with existing inequalities. Even though those inequalities might not preclude people from making an informed choice about whether they want to be organ donors, it could reflect sadly on the society, that this is what we do for people who don’t have means,” Albertsen said.

It’s hard to overcome the initial gut reaction that paying for a kidney somehow sullies the moral waters and taints an otherwise “pure” gift, Rhodes told me. The attitude lingers in the 2007 NOTA modification that officially okayed donation chains but not reimbursement for would-be donors. To Perlman and other activists, this attitude is a moral relic that claims as many as 4,500 American lives on the transplant waiting list each year.

The Price Of Altruism

That someone would volunteer for an invasive procedure they didn’t need, to part ways with a perfectly healthy organ, to donate to a stranger, wasn’t always seen as altruistic. Just a few decades ago, many thought it unhinged, Rhodes pointed out. Several years ago, Rhodes chaired a meeting of the Mount Sinai Hospital ethics board about non-directed kidney donation, she recalled. At the time, the hospital didn’t allow it because of concerns about the psychiatric health of potential donors. Nearly everyone agreed that the hospital shouldn’t allow these surgeries to proceed. Out of the corner, however, a committee member spoke up.

“There is that forest in Israel,” the physician began.

Mount Sinai’s long Jewish tradition meant that everyone in the room knew what he was referring to: the trees surrounding the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum that were planted in honor of those who risked their lives to help Jews during World War II. 

“We honor them and think they are heroes. They were also seen as crazy people, and it was certainly more life-threatening than being a kidney donor,” Rhodes told me. 

The comment hit home. When it came time to vote on Mount Sinai’s non-directed donation program, everyone in the room raised their hand, Rhodes recalled.

Once Perlman’s son, Abie, realized that he was walking around with an item that he didn’t technically need that could save another person’s life, he couldn’t be dissuaded from donating a kidney. Perlman was somewhat less-than-enthusiastic about her son’s choice.

But Abie’s well-researched response to his mom was worthy of a debate team. Humans are perfectly healthy with a single kidney, and the donation surgery is safer than everyday procedures like appendectomies and knee replacements. Long-term outcome studies show that kidney donors are just as healthy as their non-donating counterparts. What’s more, 90,092 Americans are currently waiting for a kidney and 17 people die every day waiting for a transplant. His logic came down to this: donating a kidney will save a life and cause me no harm. “Why wouldn’t I donate a kidney?”

Perlman’s rebuttal — because it’s completely bonkers, that’s why — did little to sway Abie from his quest. At 18, the minimum age for organ donation, Abie Rohrig began the lengthy, rigorous process of medical testing.

But as Perlman continued researching the idea, she gradually became intrigued, then convinced. By the time Rohrig had cleared the medical hurdles, the surgery itself seemed a breeze. When Rohrig arrived home from the hospital a few days after the donation, Perlman had made up her mind. She, too, would donate her kidney to a stranger.

“We’ve got nearly 5,000 people a year dying on the waitlist. To me, that’s not ethical when it’s preventable,” Perlman said.

After Perlman joined the One Kidney Club (her nickname for living kidney donors that she bestowed upon an online support group), she began to meet others who had donated a kidney to strangers. All shared the same experience as she and her son: a relatively minor inconvenience for them that saved the life of another. 

Perlman began to devote her efforts to enabling more people to donate to strangers. The barriers, she discovered, were surprisingly banal. Giving someone the ability to take time off work and pay for issues associated with the transplant surgery and its aftermath would clear problematic hurdles for many people, but what potential donors needed was cash.

Economists like McCormick had been contemplating this issue as well. While many researchers may have shied away from connecting a dollar figure with a functional kidney, McCormick has not. Part of McCormick’s challenge was a lack of precedent. Iran pays living kidney donors a small fixed sum of 10 million rials (about $240) as a reward, according to a 2022 study, although would-be donors can also negotiate an additional, supplementary payment from recipients. Saudi Arabia also compensates kidney donors, providing 50,000 rials (just over $13,000) to donors, while Israel provides reimbursement for expenses and lost wages that vary by patient and are based on income. Cultural and economic differences between these countries, as well as the different methods used to compensate donors, limit comparisons. 

A multitude of studies have shown that kidney transplants in the U.S. save both money and lives. Current estimates place that per person dollar amount at $1.3 million in value for the recipient’s improved quality of life and lifespan, plus the $1.45 million in savings on medical care for the no longer necessary thrice-weekly dialysis appointments. A 2022 paper placed the market value for a healthy kidney from a living donor between $10,000 and $25,000.

In a series of studies, McCormick and colleagues closed in on a figure between $50,000 to $100,000, which would remove the financial disincentives of kidney donation (as measured in lost wages and other variables), account for the value of the kidney itself, and also be large enough to spur an adequate number of donors. A system of tax breaks spread over five years would provide additional value to donors while also helping to prevent unscrupulous individuals from taking advantage of the poor and desperate. Rather than simply cutting a check, the activists working to modify NOTA proposed tax breaks at $10,000 per year for five years. If someone didn’t pay $10,000 in federal taxes, they would receive the remainder of the funds as cash. The program would start as a 10-year pilot project, and Perlman said that, if successful, it could be made permanent.

The idea has had bipartisan support, but it has also remained in legislative limbo for the past six months, waiting to be shepherded through the process that introduces a bill and transforms it into a law. With a new Congress taking office, the process will need to begin again. While no one has yet proposed reintroducing it, supporters remain hopeful.

“This is a proposal that just says donors are really generous,” Roth said, “maybe we can be generous to them in return.”

Corrections: On Feb. 14, 2025, this story was corrected to reflect the fact that Iran is not the only country that allows payment for living donors — Saudi Arabia and Israel do as well. The story was also corrected to note that Dr. Gabriel Danovitch is a nephrologist, not a transplant surgeon.

The post How Much Is Your Kidney Worth? appeared first on NOEMA.

But another event in deep history time also had a major impact on mammals, although it would never leave evidence in the fossil record. It happened when a small mammal got a virus. Compared to the surrounding apocalypse, a shrew-like being with the sniffles would normally be a pretty insignificant event. But something weird would happen with this virus, changing life on Earth almost as much as the dinosaur-ending asteroid.

This shrew-like mammal had been infected with a retrovirus, so named because they use a special enzyme to transform their RNA back into DNA (the opposite of the usual DNA-to-RNA direction). Like all viruses, a retrovirus depends on the cellular machinery of its host to copy itself. Unlike other viruses, however, the retrovirus must elbow its way into the genome of a host cell before it can begin replicating.

This process allows the virus to create long-term, smoldering infections, churning out trillions of tiny facsimiles during the host’s life. As long as the virus only infects standard body cells, the genetic intrusion ends with the infected cells’ death. The retrovirus infecting the ailing proto mammal, however, managed a rare feat and instead inserted itself into its sperm or egg cells. When the shrewish being had offspring, it passed along its own DNA, with a small viral bonus thrown in.

These types of evolutionary extras are usually harmful. If I were handed a wrench or crowbar and asked to do something to my car, the chances that I would improve it by giving it a random metallic thwack are slim. Sometimes, however, the stars align. The extra viral proteins provided some extra raw materials that natural selection could tinker with, ultimately leading to one of the mammals’ most iconic features. The placenta resembles a meaty pillow and provides a connection between the fetus and mother, but this connection was not yet complete. A retroviral protein that appeared from the sick shrew-like entity helped maternal and fetal cells merge in a single layer, increasing the nutrient transfer to the next generation. Tens of millions of years later, the syncytin gene hasn’t changed and still functions as a merge machine.

Anyone who reads papers about natural selection gets used to thinking, “WTF, evolution?!?” Some species of orchid look like female wasps to trick males into pollinating them while the insects try to mate with the flower. Peacock feathers and other ostentatious avian plumage make daily life cumbersome for males but are also irresistible to potential mates. Some types of sea cucumbers breathe with their anus.

Over the years, I had come to accept that the trillions of microbes that live in and on our bodies are an inextricable part of our own biology. I knew that our ability to withstand infection played an outsize role in how we evolved. But the placenta? Something as essential as the placenta existed because of a virus? Nearly a decade after I first stumbled across this fact, it still blows my mind. And syncytin is no oddity. As much as 8% of the human genome is actually from retroviruses.

“Endogenous retroviruses can be viewed almost as fossils that tell us something about how viruses have impacted the genomes of humans and other animals. It’s data where you can look into the past, just like bones and tools embedded in rock,” Welkin Johnson, an evolutionary virologist at Boston College, told me.

Scientists have begun learning that not only do the viruses in our genomes capture the history of human evolution, but they also continue to play a role in everything from infection control to neurons, from our earliest hours as fertilized eggs to our last breaths before death. Viruses, then, aren’t just temporary infections we contract. They aren’t an anomaly. Viruses are our default state. Emerging research is showing that much of our biology and physiology depend on these genetic fossils littering our genomes, and it’s changing the way we think of viruses — and ourselves.

“Bacteria have viruses. Even some viruses have viruses,” says Aris Katzourakis, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Oxford. “It’s viruses all the way down.”

Inheritance Goes Viral

Scientists have long turned to mice, rats and fruit flies to answer fundamental questions about biology. In the 1960s, chickens were also popular research subjects. For one, our feathered friends were easy to breed and keep in labs. As a bonus, their importance in the meat industry made understanding their genetics and physiology an economically crucial endeavor.

Solving these problems wasn’t just a boon for farmers — work on chickens resulted in major scientific breakthroughs. In the early 1900s, an elderly Long Island woman showed up on the doorstep of pathologist Francis Peyton Rous of New York’s then Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, her gnarled, arthritic hands clutching a barred Plymouth Rock hen that had grown a tumor on its right breast. Rous was unable to save the bird, but his work in understanding what had killed it led to the discovery of infectious viruses that could cause cancer.

Although the Rous sarcoma virus, as it’s known, was the first such virus discovered, plenty of others would soon join its ranks, including the human papillomavirus (HPV, implicated in cervical cancer), the feline leukemia virus, and hepatitis B and C (which can cause liver cancer in humans).

These viruses and the cancers they caused were transmitted horizontally, passed from individual to individual via blood or body fluids. Vertical transmission — inheritance from parent to offspring — didn’t happen. So, scientists expected a similar pattern of horizontal transmission of the avian leukosis virus, which caused leukemia (a cancer of the white blood cells) in egg-laying hens.

By the 1960s, farmers were trying to breed flocks free of avian leukosis. At the time, Robin Weiss was studying retroviruses for his doctorate at University College London and thought this would be a good subject for his thesis. But as Weiss pored over the breeder’s meticulous records, he noticed something unusual: The patterns of which chickens got sick didn’t look like it was caused by an infection but rather something heritable. What he had discovered was the first endogenous retrovirus — viral genes that became incorporated into the host genome and were passed along just like any other gene.

The discovery opened the floodgates. Less than two decades later, researchers would find endogenous retroviruses in the human genome, too. As researchers raced to unscramble the billions of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs that make us, well, us, it became clear that virus-like elements were not only not rare, but that they actually comprised nearly half our genome. Aside from the nearly 10% of DNA that was from endogenous retroviruses, researchers found other repetitive, viral-derived elements such as transposons and retrotransposons (so-called “jumping genes”) that comprised a whopping 44% of our genome. 

“These elements are often in a race to replicate more quickly than they can be inactivated,” says Katzourakis.

Initially, scientists wrote these elements off as “junk DNA.” Any once-functional sequence had accumulated so many mutations that it became the heritable equivalent of alphabet soup. Our chromosomes merely lugged these base pairs along like genomic baggage, generation after generation, never fully able to divest themselves of these viral parasites. Then came another chance discovery that would change everything.

How To Build A Placenta

As a pharmaceutical researcher, John McCoy had a single goal: He wanted to find the proteins and molecules secreted by cells. If these were linked to disease, they might be amenable to pharmaceutical treatment. Since McCoy wasn’t looking for a specific protein, he did the scientific equivalent of flinging a plate of pasta at the wall and seeing what would stick. One of the first signals he found was of a protein secreted by placental cells. Scientists were, just then, finishing up the draft sequence of the human genome, and although that data could pinpoint the location of the gene that coded for this placental protein to somewhere on chromosome 7, no one knew more than that.

Even to McCoy’s trained eye, the gene sequence was an unintelligible series of nucleotides. It told him nothing about what the protein did. To learn more about what the protein did, he performed a BLAST search, a kind of ersatz Google for the genomics crowd. He was hoping biologists working in mice or worms or fruit flies had found something similar. Indeed, the BLAST search turned up genes that were nearly identical to McCoy’s mystery find. But the genes weren’t from mammals or even vertebrates. They were from viruses.

“This was a retrovirus,” McCoy said. “And it’s expressed like gangbusters in the placenta.” Flanking it were two other viral genes (known as Gag and Pol) that had racked up so many mutations that they were nearly unrecognizable. But there sat a retroviral gene scientists called Env, short for “envelope,” nary a change in site. McCoy immediately recognized that our bodies were actively using this gene to do something. And McCoy needed to find out what.

In a retrovirus, the Env protein allows the virus to attach to a host cell, fusing with the host cell membrane and dumping the viral machinery. Since the gene McCoy found hadn’t really changed, he knew it had to be doing something similar in humans. He purified the protein and then added it to human cells growing in a tube. After letting the cultured cells marinate, McCoy took a peek under the microscope.

The changes were obvious. Instead of a layer of discrete cells jammed together, McCoy saw a single flat ur-cell with thousands of nuclei in a single membrane. Further experiments revealed that the forces of natural selection in the placenta had MacGyvered the viral protein into helping to fuse maternal and fetal cells in a layer called the syncytiotrophoblast. McCoy called the protein syncytin, in a nod to its function.

His results were mind-boggling, even unbelievable. When he submitted his findings to the journal Nature, editors initially rejected it, asking for more experiments that McCoy was unable to perform. It took over a year for the paper to finally be accepted and published in 2000.

“This paper has sparked a lot of work, and it’s been kind of cool to watch it grow,” says McCoy.

Perhaps the most incredible part of the syncytin story, Katzourakis says, is that it has happened several times. Humans carry two syncytin genes, from two different viruses. All told, scientists estimate that mammals evolved a virus-derived syncytin protein at least seven times over the course of evolution, with different viruses giving rise to different syncytins and, consequently, different placentas. And lest Y-chromosome carriers feel left out of the syncytin game, French scientists found that the presence of the syncytin protein increases muscle size in male mice. It makes sense, says McCoy, since building muscle mass involves a merging of cells not unlike what occurs in the placenta.

If syncytin alone were the only example of a viral influence on humanity, it would still be a pretty big deal. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s harder to get more crucial than reproduction. But the influence of these endogenous retroviruses is larger and more nuanced than McCoy ever anticipated.

New Viruses On The Block

The first signs of disease are easy to miss, even for a watchful farmer. Affected sheep begin panting and show difficulty breathing. These symptoms can indicate anything from a mild respiratory infection to something more serious. The disease caused by Jaagsiekte Retrovirus is one of the latter. Infections don’t cause pneumonia but rather an infectious lung cancer known as ovine pulmonary adenocarcinoma. 

Like all retroviruses, Jaagsiekte inserts itself into the genome of the cells it infects. The virus can cause cancer because the Env protein it uses to enter lung cells can also cause these same cells to replicate out of control. From a viral perspective, rapidly multiplying host cells is an all-you-can-infect buffet of vulnerable targets. To the unlucky sheep, however, the out-of-control dividing lung cells mean cancer.

Jaagsiekte is passed from animal to animal primarily by respiratory droplets formed during sneezing and breathing, not unlike the common cold or Covid-19. Each infected sheep develops cancer anew, from the virus it was unfortunate enough to inhale. The disease is fantastically lethal, slowly suffocating affected sheep and goats. For farmers, it became crucial to identify sheep that are resistant to Jaagsiekte.

Initially, virologists guessed that those few sheep that didn’t get sick after infection carried a mutation that prevented the virus’s genetic key from picking their cellular lock. What they found in the DNA of these resistant sheep, however, was a copy of the Jaagsiekte retrovirus itself.

The endogenous version of the Jaagsiekte retrovirus remains functionally intact, continuing to produce active copies of the virus. And these internally produced viruses protect the animal from the externally-circulating version by occupying the molecular lock the virus uses to enter the cell. If enough sheep inherit this gene, then it could drive the exogenous, infectious Jaagsiekte virus to extinction.

John Coffin, a retrovirologist at Tufts University in Boston, suspects that something analogous happened in humans. While we share many endogenous retroviruses with our ancestors, a small number of viral elements littering our genome appear to be uniquely human. These elements are members of a group known as HERV-K and HERV-H (for Human Endogenous RetroVirus) and unlike most of their relatives, don’t appear in the genomes of chimps and bonobos, our nearest relatives. This must mean infection of the genome occurred in the last million-plus years.

Infection with these human-specific HERV-K elements, in particular, is so recent (scientists estimate that it happened around 200,000 years ago — an evolutionary eyeblink) that the gene can still produce functional virus protein if it’s switched on. But when virologists tried to find relatives of the culprit among currently circulating retroviruses, they came up empty. Nothing like it seemed to exist. Coffin knew it had to exist at some point, otherwise, how would it have ended up in our DNA? He suspects the answer is that the HERV-K’s infiltration of our genome spelled the doom of the circulating version of the virus.

“That may be the reason that we no longer have any of these viruses infecting us,” he says.

From an evolutionary perspective, it was a win-win situation. Humans got immunity from a pathogen, and the virus’s genetic material could infect every human on the planet. To virologist Cedric Feschotte of Cornell University, this phenomenon is another example of how viruses continue to mold our physiology. Besides bolstering immune function, a 2018 paper showed that a neuronal protein called Arc, found in fruit flies and humans alike, originated as a retroviral Gag protein.

In animals, Arc regulates the formation of connections between neurons known as synapses. This synaptic plasticity is key to our ability to think and form memories. And developmental biologists have found that, in the hours after fertilization, waves of activation of the endogenous retroviruses buried in our genomes help to transform a humble sperm and egg cell into one that can — and will — give rise to every type of the body’s over 400 different varieties of cell. A paper published by Feschotte’s lab in April 2024 on bioRxiv, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, shows that development can’t occur without the activity of these viral elements.

“They are surprisingly required for some very fundamental developmental processes,” Feschotte told me.

But a piece of DNA with the ability to make infinite copies of itself and shove its way at random into the genome can be a dangerous thing. Interrupt the wrong gene, as with Jaagsiekte retrovirus or Rous Sarcoma Virus, and cancer can occur. Other errors can kill a cell outright if it can no longer perform its basic functions. As a result, most animals keep these segments of DNA hidden away from the molecular machinery that turns genes into proteins.

Sometimes, though, mistakes happen. Aging cells and those that have become cancerous are more likely to have endogenous retroviruses that are actively being transcribed. These viral fragments are innocuous — they don’t create an infectious virus and they can’t make copies of themselves.

But these protein pieces still hearken back to their viral origins and can trick the immune system into thinking the cell has been infected and should be eliminated, a process known as viral mimicry. Cancer biologist Charles Spruck at La Jolla’s Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute found that activating viral mimicry in mouse tumor cells would make tumor cells ideal targets for both anti-cancer drugs and for targeting for death by the body’s own immune system.

“These discoveries are changing how we think of many diseases,” says Zsuzsanna Izsvák, a biologist at the Mex Delbrūck Center in Germany.

Forged By Viruses

As it turns out, our immune systems, our synapses, our placentas and embryos, are all driven by viruses. And though the biologist in me will never not geek out about this fact (the mother-freaking placenta is due to a virus!), another part of me wants to know “So what?” Especially as the world begins to emerge from the havoc still being wreaked by Covid-19, it directly contradicts the viruses-are-bad paradigm to which we’ve become accustomed.

Our discussions of viruses are filled with martial metaphors. We do battle with pathogens that breach our defenses. They are the enemy, and our bodies must outwit and outlast their attacks. My inbox is filled with pitches from PR professionals trying to sell antiviral hand sanitizers and air purifiers. The bottle of cleaning spray I use on my countertops advertises that it kills 99.9% of bacteria and viruses. If we want to stay alive, then viruses and bacteria need to be dead.

The thousands of viral relics in our genome tell a much different story. Our massive noggins — including the one I’m using to write this piece — can do so much thinking because viruses have enabled our neurons to make and break connections. Humans have used these folded, wrinkly, virus-driven gobs of goo to invent everything from calculus to Chia Pets. Yes, we get colds and gastrointestinal bugs and meningitis, but we wouldn’t be able to care about viruses without the help of a virus. Despite their outsized importance, little real estate in introductory biology classes is devoted to the subject.

“There’s no chapter in a textbook about this. It might get a brief mention, and they’ll certainly discuss how viruses themselves evolved, but there’s less attention paid to how viruses have influenced the evolution of life,” Johnson says.

It’s a major oversight, agrees Feschotte.

Our viral past is a permanent reminder of our deep histories, of how so much of evolution’s inventions emerged from biological junk drawers filled with spare genes and proteins.

“Viruses are the motor of genetic novelty. If you want to look for new biology, you have to look at viruses,” Feschotte says. “They need the host, but we are finding more and more that the host needs them as well.”

The post Viruses Play A Leading Role In Humanity’s Story, And Not As A Villain appeared first on NOEMA.

The temperature had plunged to just above freezing. I stared at my husband who, like me, had rolled up his cargos to walk barefoot across the saturated sand, feet bright red from the cold and unwelcome North Atlantic exfoliation.

Along the horizon, a dark line of clouds promised to transform our existing difficulties into a fond memory. I watched as the incoming tide began to close in on our small strip of beach dividing the islands of North Uist and Vallay. If we wanted to catch a glimpse of the rare birds that we had journeyed thousands of miles to see — and make it back before the tide came in and blocked our return — we had to keep moving. Any bird, however, had been far smarter than us and had long since taken shelter. The only things in the sky were wind and rain and clouds.

It was an awful lot of effort for what was, essentially, a pigeon.

For millions of years, before humans domesticated pigeons for food, communication and companionship, these birds existed as rock doves. Across Europe and Asia, rock doves made their homes in small hollows on rock cliffs, scrounging nearby lands for seeds, plants, grasses and the occasional earthworm or insect to eat.

Most modern rock doves now live in cities, descendants of escaped domestic birds that have since gone feral, with a few remaining strands of “wild” DNA buried deep in their cells. Even in more sparsely settled rural areas, the birds identified as rock doves were as much pigeon as they were wild birds.

“This process is irreversible,” says Will Smith, an ornithologist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki. “Once it happens, we can never get the originals back.”

Except in the Outer Hebrides. A rocky archipelago that stretches 150 miles from north to south, some 27,000 Scots continue to call this wind-whipped stretch of land home. And as scientists discovered just a year and a half ago, so too do what is likely the world’s only remaining population of wild rock dove that hasn’t interbred with feral pigeons.

This makes these rock doves incredibly rare — and incredibly endangered. Vallay was one of their strongholds, and Smith, who has spent the last five years studying the species on Uist (pronounced YOO-ist), had sent me a detailed GPS map of how to hike there. For a new but dedicated birder, it sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime. 

Watching the charcoal clouds and incoming tide approach, however, I began questioning my decision. Why was I slogging through gale-force winds, near-freezing temperatures and pouring rain with bronchitis to see a rare rock dove? Had I embarked on a wild pigeon chase? The two birds are, after all, the same species. It’s not easy to discern a wild bird from a feral urbanite.

Only when Smith clued me in to the subtle differences in beak shape and feathers on the rump and wings could I begin to tell them apart. Though their behaviors aren’t identical, both pigeons and doves eat the same foods and play the same ecological role. To philosopher Henry Taylor at the University of Birmingham, dividing Columba livia into two different groups — pigeonholing them, if you will — was an exercise based on human values, not biological or ecological differences.

“We tend to think a species has some kind of essence, that if we allow other organisms to breed with them, we’re going to dilute that. It’s not a very good way of thinking about species,” Taylor says. And if subdividing C. livia into two species was an effort in futility, then maybe Uist’s rock doves can count the world’s hundreds of millions of pigeons as their brethren and aren’t endangered at all. 

Smith, however, disagrees. The transformation of wild rock dove to urban or domestic pigeon changed the birds in subtle but significant ways, such as making them less wary of humans and allowing them to produce more clutches of eggs during the year. Pigeons are essentially a human creation; rock doves aren’t. Genetic studies of Columba livia show that the wild rock doves of Uist are potentially at risk of extinction thanks to extensive mixing with feral pigeon populations.

What makes rock doves special, he says, is their hidden archive of genetic diversity and a historic record written in their DNA that may help scientists tease apart why some animals adapt so well to humans. The wild doves also provide a reserve of genetic diversity that can help the birds fight off a wider range of pathogens and adapt to changing conditions due to urbanization and climate change. To help save his beloved birds, Smith would have to learn what made these wild birds so special — and so distinct from their more cosmopolitan counterparts. 

“Because nobody has looked at them in depth before, every little thing we find out is brand new and exciting,” he says.

My search for wild rock doves, then, not only traced a path to an uninhabited island but also through the debates sitting at the heart of conservation. With so much need and so few resources, we all must decide what species are wild and worth saving. And those answers will have life-and-death consequences.

Country Or City Bird

In 1880, archaeologists excavating the Mesopotamian city of Sippar (located on the outskirts of modern-day Baghdad) discovered a fist-sized chunk of clay. Inscribed on one side was a series of hash marks in ancient cuneiform, an account of the purchase of barley as “bird fodder.”

This artifact, in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is part of a series of etchings, documents and hieroglyphics documenting the some 5,000-year history of pigeon domestication. Genetic studies push this history back even further, to a 10,000-year fellowship between pigeons and people, predating the domestication of all other birds, including chickens and ducks.

Although scientists can’t pinpoint exactly why humans first invited wild rock doves into the Great Indoors, they do know that the peoples of the Near East raised pigeons for food (I found an ancient Sumerian recipe for pigeon soup recreated by a modern chef). People also used pigeons for their homing ability which enabled them to navigate back home from an unfamiliar location over vast distances. This trait made the birds useful for dispatching messages between far-flung settlements.

Whatever the initial motivation for domestication, pigeons thrived with humans. “I think they’re one of the top 10 animals that has learned to live best with us,” Smith told me.

But the dividing line between the domestic pigeon and wild rock dove was never firmly fixed. Some pigeons escaped their confinement and began interbreeding with other erstwhile domestic refugees. Homing and racing pigeons could get lost or blown off course.

Since populations of rock doves were so large and widespread, many of the erstwhile domesticated pigeons went feral and began breeding with wild rock doves. Once these erstwhile domesticates began interbreeding, their elaborate plumage — such as dramatic leg feathers that make the pigeon look like it’s wearing pantaloons — had reverted to a state much closer to their wild counterparts.

Skyscrapers and multi-story buildings that dominate modern cities provide shelters analogous to the rock cliffs where doves have historically lived. What’s more, the doves’ predilection for carbohydrate-rich foods enabled them to dumpster dive for food scraps. Pigeons could raise three-to-four large clutches of eggs each year, compared to two smaller clutches produced by wild rock doves. Rapid urbanization over the past century combined with the fecundity of pigeons has, it seems, put feral and domestic pigeons at a huge advantage over rock doves.

“While we think we know them very well because pigeons are everywhere, we know almost nothing about the wild doves,” says Germán Hernández Alonso, a postdoctoral fellow in evolutionary biology at Uppsala University. Hernández Alonso points out that, for all the thousands of papers published each year on domestic pigeons, there’s far fewer in-depth studies on rock doves in all of science.

Nonetheless, rock doves and feral pigeons are the same species, however much we might try to distinguish them (by, say, labeling them “doves” and “pigeons”). Part of what makes them different has to do with the pigeons’ domestic history and the indelible imprint of humanity. Since the rise of the Industrial Age in the late 1800s, Americans have placed humans as outside of nature, says Roderick Nash, a retired environmental historian from the University of California, Santa Barbara. This ethos was ultimately enshrined in the 1964 Wilderness Act, which protected land “where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

“Civilization created wilderness,” Nash says. “The Neanderthals wandering around didn’t think of it as wilderness. They thought of it as where we live. It was only when humans came and began to put lines on the land that they drew lines in their minds.” 

This line-drawing has filled so-called wild animals with a mystique that livestock lacks, Nash says. I realized, in talking with Nash, that it was the wildness of the rock doves that made them so attractive. But that didn’t mean my search for wild rock doves wouldn’t take me on some very wild adventures.

Rise Of The Pigeon

In the 1970s, scientists on Sardinia began tracking the island’s remaining wild rock dove populations. Initially, they found that although the birds in cities and towns were mostly pigeons, wild rock doves continued to dominate in less densely populated areas. Over the next few decades, however, that shifted dramatically as feral pigeons outbred wild doves. By the 2010s, the rock doves on Sardinia were mostly feral pigeons. Ornithologists across Europe came to similar conclusions. “This huge, healthy population in the Mediterranean just collapsed,” Smith says.

The wilds of northern Scotland told a different story. On a research trip to the north coast, Smith kept spotting birds without the tell-tale feral speckles. He began to wonder whether a few wild birds had managed to hang on amongst the hills and heather. Research from Sardinia told him that more isolated locations far from large cities were most likely to yield wild rock doves. So he asked local birding groups across the UK and Ireland to identify any doves without the wing speckling characteristic of feral pigeons.

Individuals certified as bird ringers (what Americans call bird banders, those individuals who are trained and licensed to place small, labeled metal rings around a bird’s leg to enable tracking) also provided some feather samples from the doves. Cells on the end of the feathers allowed Smith to sequence their DNA.

At first, Smith’s PhD project looked like a recapitulation of the work done in Sardinia. Even in sparsely populated corners of the Scottish Highlands and islands like the Orkneys and Shetland, the genetic makeup of the birds Smith found were more pigeon than dove. But when Smith examined the DNA found on feathers gathered on North and South Uist in the Outer Hebrides, he found something different. Those rock doves showed almost no signs of interbreeding with pigeons. 

“These guys are special,” Smith says. “They’re like a blank slate for science.”

Journey to Vallay

Until I read Smith’s 2022 paper on his Hebrides discovery, I hadn’t given much thought to pigeons or their wild ancestors. But these distinctions didn’t help me understand why the doves had hung on in Uist and why these particular birds were so special. My husband and I had been planning a trip to Scotland, and so I convinced him to take a detour to the Outer Hebrides so I could see for myself. I didn’t mention that we would need to hop on two ferries in order to seek out a glorified pigeon.

I regretted my powers of persuasion immediately upon stepping onto the second ferry. The tail end of a powerful tropical storm was churning up the North Atlantic and our aging ferry pitched among angry gray waves. I clutched a seasickness bag for dear life.

Four hours later, we drove off the boat and into the inky blackness of the town of Lochboisdale on South Uist. Even with all the accouterments of modern technology, the trip was challenging. For the pigeons, flying from Scotland would have meant navigating over 60 miles of open water and fighting strong winds that barreled off the ocean. The odds that an errant pigeon would somehow arrive on Uist felt vanishingly small.

As dawn broke the next day, I pulled up Smith’s list of the best places to see rock doves and compared it with our map of the islands. Both Smith and other birders I had emailed from the area confirmed that the rock doves were easy to spot. “Can’t miss ’em,” Smith assured me.

The best place to start my search would be Vallay, an island accessible from North Uist by crossing a nearly two-mile-wide sandbar that emerged from the water for two to three hours a day during low tide. Planning the excursion on a cozy sofa with a steaming cup of Earl Grey made it seem manageable.

The weather had different plans. Shrieking winds made it hard for my husband and I to remain upright on the open beach, and that was before factoring in the pelting rain and frigid temperatures. Worse, the ground was so saturated with water that it functioned as quicksand, suctioning us up to our knees with every step, so that we had to quickly hop up on another leg in an exhausting dance I dubbed the Vallay High Step. I stopped thinking of birds and simply thought of putting one foot in front of the other.

The agonizing slowness of our progress forced us to make a game-time decision while only about two-thirds of the way across the land bridge. With worse weather on the way and running out of time, we decided to play it safe and Vallay High Step ourselves back to the car. Later, Smith told me we had been smart. Not only were we unlikely to see any doves in the abandoned buildings on Vallay due to the weather, but several people had also died when making the same crossing amid poor conditions. Still, I was frustrated. How hard could it be to find a freaking pigeon?

Extinction By Hybridization

For conservationists, hybridization is a double-edged sword. Genetic analysis has revealed that, far from being a rare anomaly, crossbreeding between two different species is quite common in the natural world. It can be the first step in the creation of a new species, Claudio Quilodran, a conservationist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Geneva, explained to me. It can save a small population from the genetic problems of inbreeding when conservationists deliberately import more distantly related individuals to freshen the gene pool in a process called genetic rescue. But hybridization can also be the death knell for a species on the brink of extinction.

In Scotland’s Cairngorms National Park, about 200 miles due east of Uist, the world’s last remaining Scottish wildcats eke out a living. Even before humans and their housecats crossed the English Channel, the wildcats were almost identical in appearance to an average tabby. A recent study in Current Biology found that over the last 60 to 70 years, as wildcat numbers have plummeted, the remaining cats have begun mating with unfixed outdoor domestic cats, spawning a population that is mostly moggy with only a hint of its wildcat ancestry. 

“Hybridization can change things very, very quickly,” says Quilodran. “With Scottish wildcats, it happened in less than 100 years.” 

Just like on Uist, an animal domesticated by humans was overwhelming its close wild relative. That this is happening is being written (and overwritten) in the billions of As, Ts, Gs and Cs in the DNA of their cells. What’s harder to measure is how much it matters.

“Species deserve to have their own evolutionary process without human interference,” Quilodran says.

Conservation decisions have hinged on the definition of hybridization. Beginning in the 1940s and 1950s, the use of the pesticide DDT, flooding and diking of the area’s marshlands to prevent mosquito breeding and the development of Florida’s Cape Canaveral had served to nearly wipe out the dusky seaside sparrow. By 1980, only six birds remained, all of which were male. Crossbreeding the remaining dusky sparrows with another similar Florida bird known as Scott’s seaside sparrows resulted in viable offspring; it seemed possible that the dusky sparrow could be saved, albeit in a modified form.

But the U.S. government ultimately ruled that such hybrid birds threatened the dusky sparrows and declined to protect the hybrids. Both birds ultimately went extinct. In a paper for the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, attorney Kevin Hill and a then-professor at the Ohio Northern University School of Law, wrote that when “presented with the choice of a 98.4% pure Dusky or none at all, the [U.S. Department of the Interior] Solicitor chose extinction. To save an abstraction of the species, the reality was allowed to die.”

For Smith, however, his work with wild rock doves isn’t about some artificial notion of genetic purity. Rather than trying to save some idealized ur-pigeon, Smith’s goal is to preserve the biodiversity of wild rock doves. The process of domestication involves a lot of inbreeding, which quickly strips much of the innate genetic variety out of a species. Since urban pigeons are largely descendants of domesticated birds, they don’t have the underlying genetic variation that’s key to a species’ health.

“Where we have different populations with different histories, we can ask deeper questions about extinction and hybridization,” Smith says. “And the more we can understand this process, the more we can learn about how to kind of mitigate its impacts across more than just this one species.”

Doves In The Wild

After our aborted mission to Vallay, I decided to try looking for rock doves in tamer landscapes. Our first stop — some abandoned outbuildings on a working farm in South Uist — was a flop. I staked out the stone barn in our rental car with my trusty binoculars, but no birds appeared. I reluctantly crossed off that location and moved northward.

Several wrong turns later, a friendly local gave us some cheerfully vague directions that involved taking the first left after the fourth cattle gate. Here, a sheep field butted up against a rocky beach and the North Atlantic. Scanning the beach from the passenger seat, I saw plenty of birds, including the vibrant orange beaks and black and white plumage of oystercatchers, numerous species of gull, and ever-present kittiwakes. Nowhere, however, was there a dove.

No sooner had I opened the door to grab our lunches out of the backseat then a startled flapping of wings greeted me. I didn’t even have time to grab my binoculars before the bird disappeared into the grass. I didn’t need them, though. I was close enough to recognize the brief flash of purple iridescence and thick black wing stripes of a rock dove without them. Giddy with excitement, I scoured the fields for any feathered friends. I saw a few birds in the distance but nothing with certainty. After wandering the beach amongst the shorebirds, we finished our sandwiches and headed further north, just east of where we had attempted our Vallay crossing the day before. 

As soon as we turned off the main road and onto a small track, we began passing rock doves. Just like Smith had promised, you couldn’t miss them. We found a place to pull off by an aging burial ground and a large farm. No sooner did we park than the birds decamped from the cemetery and moved to a hilltop 50 yards beyond. Struggling to scramble up the hill while shrugging on my jacket, I followed in pursuit.

No matter how carefully I walked or how gently I approached, the birds moved another 50 yards back every time I got a few feet closer. I tried approaching again, slower still. The doves continued to back away. The more I followed, the farther the birds got. I had no way of getting close enough to see if these birds carried the small metal bands on their legs that Smith and his team had placed on several hundred the year before. 

These doves weren’t living in some pristine wilderness. It was a working landscape. I trotted by several startled sheep and saw tramlines where fields had been plowed. Signs of human life were everywhere. The secret to finding these seemingly wild birds — and staying alive to tell the tale — was not to get as far away from human habitation as possible but to stay a bit closer.

It’s just this duality that conservationists are also beginning to embrace, that humans are of this world even as we are inexorably changing it (and not often for the better); that animal species around us aren’t perfect museum specimens but a messy scattershot of mixed bloodlines; and that “wild animal” is as much a human construct as any single species or pure genome. This chaos is so much of what makes nature special and worth protecting.

I could chase my wild doves forever, it seemed, and they would always be flying farther and further away, always just a bit wilder than I could manage.

The post Wild Pigeon Chase appeared first on NOEMA.

Then my husband dropped the bomb: “I heard there were cats.”

He had named the only phenomenon on Earth that could lure me out of bed before sunrise. That’s because cats are crepuscular or most active at dawn and dusk. The only spare time we had to glimpse the fabled street cats of Old San Juan in all their furry glory meant that I needed to get my ass out of bed.

Bolstered by my giant travel mug chock full of coffee, I was rewarded with a breezy tropical morning. We arrived at the Paseo del Morro just as the sun was peeking through the clouds, but the mile-long walkway that wove between Spanish city walls and turquoise waters sat nearly empty. As a landscape photographer, my husband was thrilled. As a cat lover, I was not. After 20 minutes of wandering and seeing a solitary tabby flick a disdainful tail in my direction, I began to wonder whether my husband had played a practical joke on me.

Then I heard the electric hum of a small golf cart puttering in my direction. It stopped 10 feet away from me. The motor generated a far more effective version of the pspspspsps that I had been trying for the last quarter-hour. Within seconds, the golf cart was swarmed by voracious, yodeling felines. Cats seemed to melt out of the rocks. I felt like I had been dropped into a scene that resulted from a Vulcan mind-meld of Salvador Dalí and T.S. Eliot. 

After filling bowls with kibble and water, the volunteer from Save a Gato, a local nonprofit helping the Paseo’s cats, tootled several hundred yards down the path, and the spectacle repeated itself. Some visitors had dubbed the mile-long trail the San Juan catwalk, and a quick perusal of the trail’s reviews revealed that I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed the feline spectacle.

So three years later, in October 2022, when I read an announcement by the National Park Service that they wanted community input on a cat management plan for the Paseo del Morro, I was confused. The cats almost seemed like they were part of the landscape. But it took only a few seconds for me to realize that no, they aren’t. Not really. I gulped hard. Was the spectacle I so enjoyed actually destroying our planet?

San Juan is filled with street cats, many of which are strays and dependent on resident ailurophiles for food. Yet to ecologists, these kitties are one of the world’s most dangerous invasive species. Félix López, cultural resources program manager at the San Juan National Historic Site, which includes the Paseo, told me the ongoing presence of more than 100 feral cats along the walkway prevents the park from conserving wildlife and the natural habitat there as it’s mandated to do.

“We should not be feeding animals in any national park site,” López says. “This is not right for the animal, not right for the environment and this is not right for us.”

For nearly 20 years, Save a Gato has been trying to reduce the Paseo’s cat population through the trap-neuter-return method, or TNR, as it’s known by the feline cognoscenti. This includes spaying and neutering feral and unowned cats, and returning them to their outdoor homes. Cat numbers will decline naturally, and the remaining felines will prevent other cats from elbowing their way into the colony’s land.

But López says the presence of Save a Gato also leads locals to abandon their unwanted kittens and cats at the Paseo. Many assume that the combination of kitty’s natural independence, and the extra food and water the nonprofit provides, will be adequate for their erstwhile pets. As a result, the Paseo’s cat population remains massive. Something, López says, must be done.

“This is an area where cats should not have been present from the beginning,” he says. “The cats just basically made the site their home.”

At community meetings in San Juan, the Park Service ran head-first into local cat lovers who objected to any efforts to manage the Paseo’s cats. Management, they knew, meant euthanasia for the animals they had come to cherish. (NPS said they will make their final decision based on public comments.)

Many environmentalists disagree, however. 

Forget the Hatfields and McCoys, or the Jets and the Sharks. One of the most vehement conflicts in modern America is between the Cat People and the Bird People. When Dara Wald held focus groups with various feline- and avian-focused nonprofits as part of her doctoral dissertation research at the University of Florida, she had to keep the wildlife organizations separate from the cat groups.

Those in cat rescue saw conservation groups as cat haters advocating for modern-day feline pogroms. Conservationists, in turn, painted rescue groups as full of crazy cat ladies whose brains were addled by Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite found in some cat feces. Addressing the cat’s impact on the environment, however, requires the two sides to work together.

“It’s not black and white,” says Lynette McLeod, an environmental psychologist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. “It’s about sitting down with people and not demonizing the other. It’s trying to find solutions that can cater to all parties. There’s no easy answer.”

So what’s a cat lover to do? Until I stuck a tentative toe into this debate, I didn’t see an inherent conflict between my love of cats and my deep-seated beliefs in conservation. To a large extent, I still don’t. But with an estimated 3o to 80 million unowned cats roaming the outdoors in the United States plus an additional 30% of the country’s 60-80 million pet cats allowed outside and global bird numbers in free fall, we must all ask ourselves, which animals do we value, why, and are our cat problems instead human ones.

Sweet Kitty As Predator

I have shared my life with cats for 20 years. I love their sandpaper tongues, their commitment to the belief that they are starving and wasting away to nuffinks as soon as the bottom of their food bowl is visible. I love their conviction that not only are cats the best species, but they are also the epitome of what a cat should be. I love how my current cat — a mischievous six-year-old former mama cat named Ophelia — insists that her habit of following me from room to room like a brown- and orange-striped shadow, and curling up between my husband and me on the couch every evening is pure coincidence and most definitely not an indication that she loves us. Not at all.

I also know that Ophelia is a predator. As an indoor cat, her prey is limited to toes, pens and my hair. If she were outside, though, there would be carnage. But then this is why humans started keeping cats around. When humans began farming in the Middle East some 10,000 years ago, they found themselves storing grain surpluses. Lots of grain meant lots of rodents. Just as mice and rats were drawn to the smorgasbord of ready carbs, cats were drawn to the rodent buffet.

More courageous cats, who were able to cope with sharing space with other cats, benefitted from the easy access to rodents and whatever food scraps they could scavenge. As a bonus, they got shelter, some protection from predators and the occasional scratch behind the ears. Humans, for their part, got mobile rodent control and an adorable companion. While we encouraged this process, even helped facilitate it, it wasn’t done with the same deliberation and care of, say, dogs and livestock. Instead, in an on-brand move for the species, cats domesticated themselves. Well, mostly.

Until the invention of kitty litter after World War II, even the most pampered of pussycats were often let outside to do their business. Whether it’s due to less time living alongside humans or some other factor, cats retained a wildness that other house pets and so-called ‘domestic’ animals didn’t have. And they still do.

Many municipalities in the U.S. have leash laws for dogs, requiring them when off the owner’s property. Cat owners, however, often let their pets out by opening the door or installing a cat flap. Finding out where kitty spends their off-hours typically requires reconnaissance with neighbors or attaching a camera to their pet.

This autonomy is much of what makes cats so endearing, says researcher Lee Niel at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. The freedom to roam and ready access to the great outdoors is tied up in what many cat owners believe is fundamental to the very nature of cats. To have a good life — to reach the highest rung of cat-ness — cats need to go outside.

In a 2021 study of more than 5,100 cat owners from Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, researchers from the United Kingdom’s Nottingham Trent University and the University of Edinburgh found that nearly two-thirds of cat owners let their cat outside for the cat’s benefit.  Kitty’s benefit, however, comes at a cost to nature. 

One study found that within a one-week period, although 44% of cats successfully hunted outdoors, they only returned with 23% of their prey. 

“Because cats only bring a small proportion of their prey home, owners don’t really see that impact,” Niel says.

Arie Trouwborst, a nature conservation attorney at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, sees this issue as a major problem. Take, for example, many endangered species laws, which institute fines and other penalties for killing protected plants and animals. If you or your child did so, you would be fined. Same goes for your dog. But your cat? There, owners are often let off the hook.

“Many authorities will take the position that these rules do not actually apply, and that that it is okay to let these cats outdoors,” he says.

Many cat owners shrug off the issue, Trouwborst says. For some, it’s the same disconnect that Niel described in Guelph, a divide between what’s known about cat behavior and what some cat owners think about their own, specific cats. To Trouwborst, the bigger issue is our tolerance of unrestrained roaming. The idea of unfettered, al fresco freedom is so elemental to felines — it’s what makes a cat, a cat — that we don’t question it.

When we see an unleashed dog running free, many of us call the owner or animal control. There’s a tacit understanding that a dog must always be restrained, confined or supervised. A wandering kitty, on the other hand, typically elicits a shrug or a pspspspsps. It’s reflected in how we hold dog owners responsible for the actions of their pets but more frequently let cat owners off the hook, Trouwborst says. What results, he writes in a 2020 paper in the journal People and Nature, is a giant loophole in endangered species legislation.

“We didn’t come up with anything that might constitute a valid justification for not applying the law. So the hypothesis that’s left is that this is just politically unattractive for government bodies to engage with,” Trouborst says. Their solution? They simply ignore it, he says.

The problem, however, isn’t just the occasional feline snacking on one of our feathered friends. Most parts of the environment are so disturbed by humans that a one-off predation wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar. The problem is the sheer number of cats roaming the outdoors. Collectively, these house pets have an impact even if each individual cat isn’t always a lean, mean, furry killing machine. Although I can’t quantify the positive impact my cats have had on my life, their impact on the environment can be. And it’s not pretty.

Each year, cats collectively kill billions of birds, rodents, insects, reptiles and amphibians. They routinely make lists of the world’s worst invasive species. Free-ranging cats have been implicated in the extinction of Lyall’s wren in New Zealand and contributed to the extinction of 33 other species , and are considered a major threat to others, especially on an island like New Zealand — where birds, otherwise, have no natural land predators. To conservationists, it’s a major crisis.

What’s In A Name?

Pet cats aren’t the only ones causing this murder and mayhem. A major issue that’s far more challenging than merely deciding to keep Fluffy inside is the large number of unowned cats roaming our streets and wilderness. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out what the heck to call them.

The most common term is feral cat. Unlike a stray cat that may be fearful but has had some contact with humans, feral cats have limited to no contact with humans and remain highly fearful. Even the friendliest housecat can have kittens that grow up to be feral if they don’t become comfortable around humans in their early development, between three to 12 weeks. 

“It’s not a descriptor with positive connotations,” says Kris Hill, a doctoral student in anthrozoology at England’s University of Exeter. “It’s not an endearment or a good word.”

The definition of feral has life-or-death implications. Being labeled as “feral” is often grounds for being euthanized at many animal shelters. Even so-called “no-kill” shelters can euthanize animals with “severe or untreatable illnesses or behavior issues,” according to the American Humane Society.  In Australia, legislation classifies feral cats as pests and permits communities to poison, trap and shoot the cats under certain circumstances. Some U.S. municipalities have laws banning people from feeding feral cats while simultaneously requiring owners of pet cats to provide them with adequate food and shelter. Same animal, different rules.

Using the word “feral” is a way for us to mentally distance ourselves from the cat — to “other” it, Hill says. As I speak with Hill, I realize that many of us have a disconnect about feral cats that’s the flip side of our attitude toward outdoor cats. We think of the feral cat as a cold-blooded killer unlike the beloved sweet kitty — as capable of similar assault — that curls up on our cat tree at home and later, purrs us into a deep slumber.

Feral cats have gained the reputation of being disease-ridden, aggressive and anti-social. There’s some truth to this. Unfixed cats fight and yowl at all hours of the day. Cats spray urine to mark their territory, tomcats to signal their reproductive availability, which can leave a musky, pungent smell. Cat intestines are also required for the single-celled parasite Toxoplasma to complete its life cycle, and can cause disease in humans and other mammals. Scientists have identified devastating Toxoplasma outbreaks in marine mammals, infected when contaminated water made its way to the sea. But this doesn’t mean that feral cats don’t have rich social lives with other cats or that they should be universally reviled, Hill says. 

It’s a view that’s shared by many who advocate for TNR as a humane, compassionate way to reduce the number of unowned cats. Hard evidence on whether TNR works is scarce and inconclusive. So, for that matter, is evidence of the efficacy of euthanizing feral cats. But not everyone believes that TNR is humane or appropriate.

Bird conservation organizations like the National Audubon Society and the American Bird Conservancy condemn TNR as ineffective and inappropriate. Spayed and neutered cats still hunt, after all. Even People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals objects, arguing that “although altering feral cats prevents future generations from suffering, it does not protect cats from the litany of other problems that they may encounter.

Allowing feral cats to continue their daily struggle for survival in a hostile environment is rarely a humane option.” Often the best option, PETA says, is euthanizing the cats. What’s more, the presence of cared-for feral cat colonies encourages people to dump their unwanted cats. The TNR challenges faced by Save a Gato in San Juan are echoed across the United States and around the world.

If humans can’t agree on what a feral cat is and what it means to live your life as a feral animal, then it’s probably not surprising that we also can’t agree on how to approach the problem of feral cats. As Wald spoke to wildlife advocates and cat rescues across Florida, she found that nearly everyone recognized that the state had far too many unowned cats and that communities needed to bring those numbers down. But even this agreement on the fundamentals of an issue isn’t enough to convince both sides to work together. Different values and priorities make that seemingly impossible.

Both sides, Wald says, value animal life. Cat advocates told her that their beloved four-legged felines have as much right to life as other animals, and are only one of many species that kill birds and rodents. (After all, bird populations are in decline for many reasons, including habitat loss largely from agriculture, climate change, pesticides and toxins, other invasive species, and their deaths from collisions with glass and other industrial infrastructure.)

Birders and wildlife lovers say that the value of a wild species far outweighs that of feral and pet cats. Whereas nearly half of all global bird species are in decline, according to a 2022 State of the Birds report by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative, Felis catus isn’t going anywhere.

The point of Wald’s research isn’t to tell communities what species to value, but to figure out how they can come together to address the problem. Officials in Canberra, Australia, for example, created a rule that all newly-adopted cats must be kept indoors, allowing older cats to continue to roam in most neighborhoods. Within a few years, the city’s cat population will be exclusively inside-only (or leashed when outside). Miami-Dade Animal Services in Florida has started paying volunteers $15 for every adult feral cat that they trap and spay or neuter. 

What made these programs work is the recognition that the problem with cats has nothing to do with cats at all. The issue is a fundamentally human problem. Even basic veterinary care can be inaccessible to some pet owners. We let our cats roam instead of keeping them inside or taking a page from the social media hashtag, #adventurecats, and walking them on a leash. We provide food but don’t spay and neuter them. And when we move, we don’t or can’t always take our cats with us. 

Even I, knowing all this, played a part by relishing the presence of the cats along Old San Juan’s walkway. While the chances that I will ever turn down the chance to pet a cat are minimal, I also can’t deny that everyone — residents, tourists, local wildlife, even the cats themselves — would be better off if all cats had indoor homes and the Paseo was magically feline-free.  The presence of so many unowned felines is a human failing, and we owe it to ourselves and the animals we love to do better.

The post Cat-astrophe appeared first on NOEMA.

My goal was simply to anesthetize them and then search their wrinkled, vellum wings and bulging eyes for mutations. It was a classic introductory genetics experiment, one taught to countless aspiring biologists for a century. I doused a cotton ball with ether, the fruity-smelling liquid that would render the flies temporarily unconscious (and easier to count). The instructor warned us to make sure the flies were completely knocked out, so they didn’t wake up mid-experiment. So I left the ether-soaked cotton on the vial an extra minute or two. Just to be safe.

It wasn’t the first time I killed an animal in the name of science. I dissected a fetal pig in a high school biology class. I massacred bacteria by the billions as a student research technician and budding microbiologist. The only twinge of guilt I felt when dissecting worms as a 12-year-old was when my mom served spaghetti with meat sauce for dinner, and the noodles on my plate looked all too similar to the slimy earthworms I had earlier dispatched to Valhalla with a scalpel. 

And so I told myself that the flies had lived a good life, with plenty of overripe bananas and opportunities to swipe right on Drosophila Tinder. They died for a good cause. 

I’m not heartless. Had I accidentally gassed several dozen kittens, I would have yeeted myself off the nearest building, overcome with guilt. These were flies. It was no big deal.

Most biologists would agree with me. “When I started studying bees in the late 1980s, the prevailing view was not just that they’re not conscious, but that they are just incapable of any kind of emotion,” Lars Chittka, a sensory and behavioral ecologist at Queen Mary University of London, told me recently. “The whole notion would have seemed just absurd.”

However, a growing collection of new experiments is challenging the old consensus. Far from being six-legged automatons, they can experience feelings akin to pain and suffering, joy and desire. When Chittka gave bumblebees an extra jolt of sucrose, their favorite food, the bees buzzed with delight. Agitated, anxious honeybees, on the other hand, responded with pessimism when researchers shook them to simulate a predatory attack. Other researchers found that they “scream” when under threat. Ants display rudimentary counting abilities, can understand the concept of zero and make tools. Fruit flies learn from their peers. Cockroaches have complex social lives. Fruit flies drown themselves in booze when deprived of mating opportunities. Some earwigs and other insects play dead when threatened by a predator.

In other words, insects have thoughts and feelings. The next question for philosophers and scientists alike is: Do they have consciousness?

Nearly 400 years ago, the French philosopher and polymath René Descartes formulated a devastatingly simple answer to the question, “What is consciousness?” Cogito, ergo sum —I think, therefore I am. Hidden in that three-word Latin phrase is the assumption that humans are the only thinking animals. No matter how emphatically you ask a monkey or a snail whether they are alive and conscious, they will never answer. As the only species endowed by God with a soul and rational mind, humans, Descartes believed, sat at the summit of all life on Earth.

Cutting-edge research over the last few years has begun to shift this view. 

“Humans are no longer seen as at the pinnacle of creation,” Catherine Wilson, a philosophy fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, told me. “There’s a greater modesty and awareness in which we are just one species — and maybe not even the most important species.”

To Wilson, the biological basis of consciousness arises from the separation of self from the world. “Animals need to know what their movements are and what is happening in the world,” she said. That gives rise to an experience, which is the fundamental building block of consciousness. It’s an idea that builds on a 1974 essay by the philosopher Thomas Nagel, who tried to answer the question of consciousness by asking: “What is it like to be a bat?” Unlike most humans, who move through the world guided mostly by sight, many bats are nearly blind and navigate by sound. And while many of us may have imagined life as a bat, only bats can know what it’s like to be a bat.

“Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task,” Nagel wrote. “I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions and modifications.”

If any creature has a sense of what it’s like to be that creature, Nagel’s argument goes, it’s conscious. Whether we humans can understand what it’s like is beside the point. As I was re-reading Nagel’s essay recently, a group of cardinals alit on the bird feeder outside my office window. My cat perched on the sill, ears forward like furry satellite dishes, her tail swishing in preparation for a pounce. She even called out to them, a raspy chirp of eckeckeckeckeck.

My cat almost certainly has a sense of what it’s like to be a cat, and a bat has that same sense for itself, but do flies and other insects? And if they do have this sense, where does it come from? 

Whereas Descartes could claim that human consciousness was a gift of the divine, modern scientists and philosophers don’t treat consciousness as if it were miraculously bestowed upon the world, all neatly tied up with a big red bow. Consciousness, then, is a natural phenomenon, not a religious one. 

That meant consciousness had to have a biological explanation. That explanation immediately focused on the brain. To Descartes and like-minded philosophers, consciousness is inextricably linked to the human mind. 

“It’s all about the cortex,” Christopher Hill, a philosopher at Brown University, told me. The cortex is the brain’s folded, wrinkly cap — what science communicator Ze Frank calls “the thinky thinky parts.” The swollen cortex of a person controls many of the features that we typically consider make us human: things like rational thought, awareness and language. If consciousness were a purely human phenomenon, then its origination in the cortex makes sense. The human cortex is so much bigger than other species’ that it’s part of what makes Homo sapiens neurologically special. 

Despite their reputation as mindless automatons, insects have three blobs of neural tissue that, taken together, form a brain. What insects don’t have is a cortex — nothing that even resembles one. To Hill, this means they can’t have consciousness. Without this dense, gray lid of neurons, consciousness is just not possible.

Other researchers aren’t so sure. They have begun to question whether consciousness originates from a place at all, spurring a rethinking of why it exists in the first place. However overgrown it might be in humans, the cerebral cortex didn’t emerge fully formed out of nowhere. It evolved over time, as did other neural structures. And if consciousness also evolved, then maybe the cortex isn’t the be-all, end-all of consciousness. Maybe consciousness is far more primitive. 

Insects might lack the hardware called a cerebral cortex, but they have plenty of other neural real estate. Could their brains perhaps contain the basis of consciousness? 

Like most good collaborations, it began over beer. Colin Klein, a philosopher, and Andy Barron, who studies the neural mechanisms of animals, then both working at Macquarie University in Sydney, met at a science pub night. They had a pint and struck up a conversation on what researchers call the neural correlates of consciousness. 

In the beginning, they agreed that insects were not conscious. But as they talked, they started to punch holes in their assumptions. They remembered that, in 2007, the Swedish neuroscientist Björn Merker argued that consciousness didn’t originate in the highly advanced cortex, but in a more primitive section of the brain at the top of the brain stem. Klein and Barron honed in on one part of that area, the tongue-shaped segment of neurons about an inch long called the midbrain, which controls a variety of involuntary functions, such as vision and motor control, as well as processing some sensory input. It was this latter task that attracted Merker’s attention for its potential role in consciousness. 

Klein and Barron found Merker’s argument compelling — and if it was true, insects might very well be conscious. In a 2016 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they argued that insects do have the functional equivalent of the human midbrain, which means they could very likely have some form of consciousness. 

Not many people believed the conclusion, Klein told me. A big mistake, he pointed out, is thinking that insect consciousness is like human consciousness. Humans tend to think of consciousness as the ability to worry ourselves into knots about future events that have an infinitesimal chance of happening — or to question whether other species have consciousness. But consciousness itself, Klein says, is much deeper and more primitive. It’s a sense of yourself in the world. It’s suffering. It’s bliss.

It’s hard to get more primitive than pain and pleasure. Even bacteria know kinds of pain and pleasure — they are hardwired to swim toward some signals but away from others. So do fish. And insects.

But so what? If insects have consciousness, what does that even mean?

A moral philosopher who has pondered this question is Peter Singer. Singer stopped eating meat in the late 1960s as a student at Oxford University, after a friend told him about the abuse of animals in the meat industry. Singer’s 1975 book “Animal Liberation” — widely considered to be the founding philosophy of the animal rights movement — laid bare the problems of overlooking suffering in everything from scientific research to food. 

But at first, insects weren’t on his radar. “I was always unsure about invertebrates, such as cephalopods and crustaceans,” he told me. “I wasn’t thinking very much about it. I was just hoping that they weren’t sentient and there wasn’t an issue there.”

Over the years, however, Singer has continued to ask himself about the nature of animal suffering and what enables it, biologically. He has come to the same conclusion as Klein and Chittka: that insects do have some sort of consciousness. 

But Singer takes it one step further: If insects are conscious, how should humans treat them? Take agricultural pesticides. Anything that causes mass suffering and death in its intended victims is problematic, he said, because whether or not those victims are conscious, they can feel pain. Thus, farmers should use whichever one causes insects to immediately lose consciousness — “the equivalent of a humane slaughter law.” 

I asked Singer if there was some sort of suffering math that could be calculated. If, say, a cricket is one-tenth as conscious as a chicken and can thus only suffer one-tenth as much, but it requires 100 crickets to get the same protein as a chicken, would we then be increasing the suffering in the universe by an order of magnitude? 

Singer paused for a minute, then nodded. “Maybe,” he said. It’s not that simple, he went on, but it’s something most governments should be thinking about, and they aren’t.

Most, but not all. Last November, the British government recognized crustaceans and cephalopods (octopi and squid) as sentient, and proposed legislation would make it illegal to boil lobsters alive. There are already laws barring the same cooking method in Switzerland and elsewhere.

In the end, I don’t know whether insects have consciousness or not. Nobody else can say for sure, either. I do, however, think the question is worth asking: What is it like to be a bee or an ant? We lose little by elbowing humans out of the center of every decision-making process, instead asking how our actions impact other animals, even small ones we think are dumb and gross. As Wilson put it: “We are living, suffering and enjoying beings in a whole world of other living, suffering and enjoying beings. And we should not be depriving them unnecessarily of their experiences.”

The post The Surprisingly Sophisticated Mind Of An Insect appeared first on NOEMA.