The Arthropoda Foundation
Tens of trillions of insects are used or killed by humans across dozens of industries. Despite being the most numerous animal species reared by animal industries, we know next to nothing about what’s good or bad for these animals. And right now, funding for this work is scarce. Traditional science funders won’t pay for it; and within EA, the focus is on advocacy, not research. So, welfare science needs your help.
We’re launching the Arthropoda Foundation, a fund to ensure that insect welfare science gets the essential resources it needs to provide decision-relevant answers to pressing questions. Every dollar we raise will be granted to research projects that can’t be funded any other way.
We’re in a critical moment for this work. Over the last year, field-building efforts have accelerated, setting up academic labs that can tackle key studies. However, funding for these studies is now uncertain. We need resources to sustain the research required to improve the welfare of insects.
Why do we need a fund?
We need a fund because we need a runway for high-priority research. Scientists need to make plans over several years, not a few months. They have to commit now to a grad student who starts next year and finishes a project two years after that. The fund helps guarantee that resources will be there to support academics in the long-term, ensuring that entire labs can remain devoted to this work.
We need a fund because we need to let researchers be researchers, not fundraisers. A fund doesn’t just buy critical research; it buys the ability of the world’s few insect welfare scientists to focus on what matters.
We need a fund because funding scientific research on insect welfare isn’t easy for individual donors. First, it’s hard to know what to fund. As some of the few researchers who have worked on these issues in EA, we’re lending our expertise to vet opportunities. Second, universities take overhead that reduces the impact of your donations; an independent fund can use the board’s volunteer labor to make the many small reimbursements that are required to cover costs directly. Third, if you’re a donor who’s giving below the amounts required to support entire projects, your opportunities are extremely limited. This fund smooths over such hurdles, ensuring that everyone can support the highest value research.
This fund gives a brand new field some time to get established, it gives that field the resources required to produce essential science, and it keeps that research as cost-effective as possible. Please support welfare science.
Team
Bob Fischer is a Professor at Texas State University and the lead project manager and author of the Moral Weight Project, a research project to build comparative models of moral weight across animal species.
Daniela Waldhorn is the Director of Animal Welfare research at Rethink Priorities, a board member of the Centre for Animal Ethics at Pompeu Fabra University, and lead author on the largest initial EA project focused on studying invertebrate welfare.
Abraham Rowe is the Principal of Good Structures, a nonprofit operations service provider, and was previously the COO of Rethink Priorities, and the co-founder and Executive Director of Wild Animal Initiative, an academic field-building and grantmaking organization supporting research on wild animal welfare.
Thank you Bob, Daniela and Abraham for this initiative! I hope you will succeed in raising the necessary funds.
A little anecdote to illustrate just how useful I think your work would be: For one of my forthcoming papers addressing the issue of insect farming, I had the opportunity to realise how few studies there are on the question of insect welfare, particularly in a farming context. The studies on the sentience or well-being of insects that exist to date have almost never looked at insects specifically used for food or feed (notably the black soldier fly and, to a lesser extent, the tenebrio molitor.) Similarly, there is very little data on what constitutes good or bad rearing conditions for the insects used and the least harmful ways of killing them, particularly in the light of the practices currently favoured by the industry.
tl;dr: I strongly agree there's a huge data gap that would be extremely useful to address in an attempt to bring this issue to the attention of decision-makers.
Happy to see this. I think new funds are really valuable now for different EA-related causes. I assume we really want to get away from a reliance on OP, and in the process, want to partner more with collaborators that aren't conventional EAs.
Kudos for organizing!
I'm glad this now exists, and the leadership seems great! My impression is that work on restricting the growth of the farmed insect industry is similarly very funding-constrained. Given that, I'm curious about the decision to focus the foundation's efforts exclusively on scientific research rather than also supporting policy or advocacy work.
Granted, many worthwhile causes are funding-constrained. However, our view is both that it's especially hard to fund empirical research and that it's especially important to fund it, as it's essential to improving industry practices. Understandably, others may have different priorities, but after thinking long and hard about the various strategic considerations, this is where we land.
What a brilliant logo!
Great to see!
Here it sounds like the fund is focused on farmed insects, but the website seems more broadly concerned with arthropods. Will it include other arthropods? Will it include wild arthropods, too?
I think the vast majority of arthropods, by numbers of individuals, are wild mites, springtails and copepods, and it seems important to know more about them, like their possible sentience and moral weights, whether their lives are good or bad, and how they are affected by human activity. I'd guess interventions that affect the numbers of animals used by humans usually affect many times more mites, springtails and/or copepods.
Good question, Michael. Yes, we're open to funding research on other arthropods. For now, the best way to ensure that there's a stable field of insect of welfare science seems to be to back work on farmed insect welfare. But as that changes, funding priorities will change too.
Thank you for this timely initiative, Daniela, Abraham and Bob.
Voluntarily pioneering a highly neglected, underfunded, and morally almost forgotten field must come with no small burdens, but also with great opportunities. Best wishes for the future.
Thanks for this work, it's great to see! I'm curious how much room for funding you believe this fund / field has?
Great question, Caroline! We think there's quite a lot of room right now. We could easily grant out ~$100K per year for the next couple of years; and as the field grows, we would expect to be able to grant out two or three times that annually. However, even relatively small amounts can be useful. Funding a master's student in the US, for instance, often costs less than $35K per year and some studies can cost roughly the same amount. So, every little bit helps!
Is this separate from Insect Institute? The title of the post made me think that Insect Institute was rebranding to Arthropoda Foundation.
Thanks for the question! This is a fully separate and unaffiliated group that only works on scientific research on insect welfare.
The Insect Institute, to my knowledge, doesn't do any scientific research, nor fund it.
Together with The Insect Institue, we have recently written several critical reviews of insect farming in terms of economic, environmental, consumer acceptability and waste recycling aspects.
Although we are not providing new data with these articles, we are compiling data from both the academic and industrial worlds to provide a critical view, which is still fairly rare. TII have 6 papers under review or accepted with minor or major revision.
All six preprints are now up and publicly available.
Should this comment be a top-level Forum post?
I think we'll wait until we've had at least one or two papers published before making the big announcement, which shouldn't be too long. I'll discuss it with the people at TII who will make the decision (I contributed to 5 of those 6 papers, but I'm not affiliated to TII).