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Scientists Discovery Noriceptors in Rainbow Trout: Opportunity for Empathy with Fish from Painful Animal Study

A recent article by Agnieszka Biskup in the Boston Globe caught my eye with the headline, “Pain Goes Another Step Down the Food Chain.” Biskup was reporting on the results of a study on the effect of injecting bee venom or acetic acid into the lips of rainbow trout. After inflicting tissue damage to the heads of the fish, the researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the Roslin Institute discovered for the first time that fish have noriceptors.

I remember what rainbow trout are like from summers fishing in Yosemite. I always had to have an uncle or a sibling smash their heads on a rock, the quickest way to end their pain. Eventually, I stopped fishing and stopped eating fish. My brothers tell me, though, that I kept eating tuna for a while longer because I did not know that the mayonnaise, pickle, and canned tuna that I knew as “tuna” came from a fish somewhere. The irony of this as I eat veggie “burgers,” I have yet to fully understand.

I know what bee venom feels like. I imagine that I would be pissed off if someone injected bee venom into my lips. Acetic acid doesn’t sound like it should go in my lips either. Biskup writes of the study’s reports on the test, “The fish showed ‘rocking’ motions, similar to the kind of motion seen in higher animals in pain. The trout injected with acetic acid rubbed their lips on the gravel of their tank and on the tank walls.” The fish also delayed eating much longer than the fish who weren’t injected with acid. Still, one might say that those are things that fish do when you inject them with bee venom. The fact that they move like us when they are injected with substances that we know to cause pain does not mean that they “feel” pain like humans do, or dogs for that matter.

But finding fish noriceptors I know to be important. I know this because I have no idea what noriceptors are, and I don’t think most other people do either. I still don’t know what they are exactly, but according to the article, amphibians, birds, and mammals have them. Exciting fish noriceptors by causing tissue damage to the heads of the trout had “adverse behavioral and physiological effects.”