Wikipedia

The industry calls it “eyestalk ablation”—a method used to force female shrimp to reproduce faster. According to shrimp welfare project : “Researchers discovered that when shrimps are subjected to ESA, they try to escape it. They also flick their tails and rub their eye area. When the wounds are covered or medicine is given, the shrimps calm down. This suggests that the ablation caused them pain and distress. ​Ablated females’ offspring are less tolerant of stress. They are also more likely to get diseases. There are many possible stress factors for animals in aquaculture. These include handling, crowding, high stocking densities and poor water quality. Eyestalk ablation is one more thing that worsens their welfare.”

Footage of “Prawn Eyestalk Ablation”.

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    • ozymandias@sh.itjust.works
      361·
      11 days ago

      in the old school of scientific thought, such critters were thought to be automatons with no true internal state or feelings.
      like pulling the wheels off a lawnmower.
      i don’t see how anyone ever thought that, but it was mainstream.
      i mean, not long before that they thought that rats spontaneously generated out of rotting food.

      • Grail@multiverse.soulism.netEnglish
        153·
        11 days ago

        People these days will have a philosophical debate about the meaning of beauty with a computer and then say “It’s obviously not sentient because we used math to put it together”.

        I’m not saying LLMs are conscious, I’m saying we are completely fucking clueless about any of this. When it comes to theories of consciousness we have made zero empirically-driven progress since the stone age. We have no tool to measure qualia, nobody has ever invented one of those yet.

        • Batmancer@sh.itjust.works
          5·
          10 days ago

          I am confident all existence is alive. Some parts are just grouped together to have nerves and multiple layers of consciences to do weird stuff and move around.

        • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zoneMEnglish
          3·
          10 days ago

          People genuinely think we’ll be able to upload our brains to computers in the future when all our current brain scanning technology is laughably archaic.

          • stray@pawb.social
            3·
            10 days ago

            I think to replicate a human brain you would have to intentionally create a lot of inefficiency and errors that I don’t think anyone would really bother doing outside of a handful of “just because I can” projects. If we do achieve that technological level I think we’ll see personalities and functionalities intentionally edited (for fun or for dystopia reasons) rather than faithful uploads.

            • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zoneMEnglish
              3·
              9 days ago

              It’s not that creating a human brain on a computer is out of reach, it’s that copying a living person’s brain is so far beyond current imaging techniques that we won’t be able to do it within the century.

              • ozymandias@sh.itjust.works
                1·
                9 days ago

                people recently froze and scanned every single neuron in a fruit fly’s brain, then they simulated that as a neural net, they put that into a 3d simulated work and put the fruit fly in a simulated body with stimuli from simulated eyes and nerves… it was able to fly, find food, and cleaned itself with it’s feet like a fruit fly….
                we’ll be able to do it within 100 years, ai will probably help us.
                might be destructive of the patient’s brain though….
                on top of that we’ll get augmented cyborg humans who blur the line between computer and human.
                btw, you should definitely watch “Murder Bot”, it’s kinda a dark humor, consciousness philosophy, sci-fi show, with just a little bit of murder.

                • TotallynotJessica@lemmy.blahaj.zoneMEnglish
                  1·
                  8 days ago

                  This seems less like copying a brain onto a computer and more like getting a better understanding of how the brains is structured. Would a human version be a copy of that person, or just a model that can be used to understand how the brain generally works? Even if you capture the full structure of every neutron in a brain, the brain is more than just structure.

                  A brain without electrical activity is a dead brain, and even if you can simulate activating neurons to see what they would do, it wouldn’t be more like shocking a dead animal to see how its limbs twitch. You’d need to use another method to scan the patterns of action potentials that constantly occur throughout a living brain. You’d also need to be able to map how neurons rewire their connections with neighboring neurons from the way they fire and interface with their neighbors (aka the mechanism for learning and encoding information).

                  This becomes an even greater challenge when you consider that it would likely require invasive surgery to even get that structural scan of the brain, something that could easily kill a person before you had the time to get all the information you’d need. It’d probably be even more invasive to implant enough electrical sensors to actually differentiate individual neurons, and a lot can go wrong. You’d need to scan countless times while also having the patient be alive, conscious, and experiencing a range of emotions and events to more completely understand their specific brain in motion. Needless to say, were still a far shot from truly digitizing an animal, and even further away from being able to scan a person.

                  Another big consideration is the stability of the world during this time. Enough anti intellectualism or persistently terrible economic conditions could cut down on skilled researchers available. Wars and authoritarianism could cause brain drain away from the long term projects that do this sort of work. If climate catastrophe or nuclear war or an AI apocalypse fucks things up enough, the timeline might be pushed back even farther. People assume that today’s world is tomorrow’s, and I can personally assure you that is not a safe assumption, even in science.

  • anon6789@lemmy.world
    14·
    11 days ago

    Yikes. I tried keeping shrimp for a bit, and they are very interesting animals. Keeping a small scale aquatic ecosystem balanced can be very tricky.

    Thankfully this practice seems to be something the industry is looking at moving away from, and a lot of research is being done to better understand their reproductive cycle. It sounds like Best Aquaculture Practice (BAP) label shrimp will have to not use eyestalk ablation by 2030. Studying shrimp hormone production, along with better nutrition and water quality will hopefully end this process.

    I found this industry article from Hatchery Feed and Management discussing the 2030 cutoff, and there are some links at the bottom that briefly cover different studies and research being done to come up with something better for shrimp and shrimp producers.

    It’s crazy how little we have really studied animals up until this point in time, though to be fair, it’s only been about 150 years since germ theory became commonly understood, so we have really been throwing darts at understanding how we ourselves function until very recently.