[Slraep]

Originally Posted by Caitlin Williams

They (mollusks) may not have brains and nervous systems, but they have a kind of mussel consciousness group mind. Did you know they sing together? They do it with their shells, since they don't have throats either...........They can sound happy or sad. Seriously.

I spend part of the year on the beaches of Prince Edward Island. There use to be shellfish galore there. I have heard the singing Caitlin is writing about! Yes, they do it with their shells! Yes, they are like the "Borg"! Experiments are being done to discover the chemicals they release to communicate with each other.

It is one of the greatest pleasures on earth to walk in between vast mussel beds and "listen" to them. I'm serious too.

[jshepherd]

They (mollusks) may not have brains and nervous systems, but they have a kind of mussel consciousness group mind. Did you know they sing together? They do it with their shells, since they don't have throats either...........They can sound happy or sad. Seriously.

Singing together or grouping in specific areas can pretty easily be explained by reflex reaction to the same outside stimulants. Being happy or sad is an emotion. Emotions are a cognitive process. Without a brain there can be no cognitive process.

The anatomy of a mollusc is not in question. They do not have a central nervous system and they do not have a brain. Sure one could argue that they have a soul just like trees and flowers. That still does not mean they feel any pain or fear; both of these are unpleasant emotional experiences.

[Caitlin]

I love those pictures of mussel beds. Those are mylitus edulis? (sp?)

We have a thread or two featuring the pearls from similar sea mussels. They are very blue. There was some kind of dis-ease among those mussels and an extraordinery number of them produced tiny blister and/or loose pearls.

[kb2rocket]

I chose the quahog because it is very easy to come by where I live
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today I ate a bunch of animals 2 eggs ham and a burger and I never felt bad about it till now I guess I have issues to deal with
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mounting these pearls I guess will have to be some type of clamp cage or container if they are that brittle
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ok Ive run out of things to say time to plot the next step

[Caitlin]

They can sound happy or sad.

I did not say they WERE happy or sad, I said they can sound that way. Maybe they are little microphones transmitting the feelings of something else, maybe not, but I can understand why they are anthropomorphisized as living in "beds" and "singing", filtering away, and sometimes producing pearls.......bezoars........I find myself "loving" these little guys........

[Slraep]

Originally Posted by jshepherd

The anatomy of a mollusc is not in question. They do not have a central nervous system and they do not have a brain. Sure one could argue that they have a soul just like trees and flowers. That still does not mean they feel any pain or fear; both of these are unpleasant emotional experiences.

So Jeremy, what do you think of "Do crabs not have vision because they lack the visual centres of humans?"? Because It can easily be modified to "Do bivalves not feel pain because they lack the brain of a vertebrate?" Obviously the answer to the first question is NO.

Slraep

[jshepherd]

Unless one were to come up with a new definition of pain, no. They do not feel pain. It is impossible to feel pain if there is no cognitive ability. Can there be a reaction to tissue damage? Of course. Every living thing whether animal or plant has a reaction to damage. This is not the same as pain.
Pain is just the wrong word, especially because it elicits emotion from humans who really do feel pain.

[Slraep]

Originally Posted by Caitlin Williams

I love those pictures of mussel beds. Those are mylitus edulis? (sp?)

Yes, they are your common blue(eatin' type) mussel. Almost all the blue mussels in PEI available for eating are farmed. People complain about grit in the wild ones. I have to say that wild bivalve populations around the island are getting scarce due to(what else)over harvesting. I will never show people I do not know to be ecologically minded the location of certain still thriving beds(that includes clams too).

The beauties below are held by my husband who this year discovered a thriving bed of big clams(he put them back!). You have to dive a good way from shore in some deep water. It has to be a nice day because the water is freezing otherwise. You need a snorkel and shovel/rake too. We don't like disturbing the beds but I wanted a pic. There aren't many of these cuties left around the island.

[kb2rocket]

I find my self pondering "happy as a clam" and "The world is my oyster"

[Slraep]

Originally Posted by jshepherd

Pain is just the wrong word, especially because it elicits emotion from humans who really do feel pain.

Yeah but that's the thing---they cannot feel our pain because they have no central nervous system and brain, but perhaps we cannot feel theirs because we don't have whatever it is they have.

You know, SF writers love to exploit stories like extraterrestrials who are built totally different from us, using humans as experiment fodder because they are sure we do not feel pain. After all we don't have a "fazoodle" that's connected to a "greemie".

Slraep

[Valeria101]

Can anyone give an unbiased diagnostic of happiness?

I can understand a human feeling happiness or sadness, or both listening to a blanket of oysters clamping their hinges to lock tide water in. It an eerie, alien sound. Add the sea smell and it feels like hearing mist grinding its teeth - my hair is rising just thinking of it! You'd have to be dead to feel nothing.

What does that have to do with anything

[Slraep]

Originally Posted by Valeria101

Can anyone give an unbiased diagnostic of happiness?

I think you just did!

Can anything match the magic and beauty of nature? Nature, healthy and thriving? I got goose bumps just reading your description!

Slraep

[Slraep]

Has anyone ever wondered how parrots are able to distinguish gender between themselves when we humans have to have parrots sexed by a lab? Some males and females of certain species look EXACTLY alike. If we compare their "primitive"(four cone) eye sight against a human's highly evolved colour eyesight, what do you think we will find? If we don't compare their eyesight to a human's, then what do we think we will find? Just recently scientists have discovered that birds can see UV light as distinct colours. That's why a female parrot can spot a male parrot from a distance. She sees his colours---ones that we cannot.

Maybe we arrogantly see our human form and function as the ultimate thing to be measured against. Mother Nature tells us otherwise. Are we blind?

"Beyond Human Perception our experiments provided evidence that birds use all four cones in their color vision. But it is difficult—impossible, in fact—for humans to know what their perception of colors is actually like. They not only see in the near ultraviolet, but they also can see colors that we cannot even envision."

"We humans customarily assume that our visual system sits atop a pinnacle of evolutionary success. It enables us to appreciate space in three dimensions, to detect objects from a distance and to move about safely. We are exquisitely able to recognize other individuals and to read their emotions from mere glimpses of their faces. In fact, we are such visual animals that we have difficulty imagining the sensory worlds of creatures whose capacities extend to other realms..."

"We are so locked into the world of our own senses that, although we readily understand and fear a loss of vision, we cannot conjure a picture of a visual world beyond our own. It is humbling to realize that evolutionary perfection is a will-o’-the-wisp and that the world is not quite what we imagine it to be when we measure it through a lens of human self-importance."


http://www.csulb.edu/web/labs/bcl/el...sion_intro.pdf


Slraep

[kb2rocket]

well because I have somewhat of a brain I processed everything you all have said then I did a internet search to get the rest of the worlds opinion and here is how I now feel .. . that may be partialy mis quoted and stolen

if you are concerned with inflicting pain on animals based on your human perception of pain
then you should be kind to all mamals avoid hooking fish and dont worry about clams
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even if a clam does feel pain it does not wish it to stop a clams responses to tissue damage is painful mentaly to us because we have a brain that can compare it to our own experences
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I also read somewhere that a clam does have a very very primative brain that organizes activitys like spawning digging feeding ect.

[Raisondetre]

Is this merely an academic discussion of whether molluscs feel pain? By scientific definition they do not. It does not mean that any given stimulus is pleasant by our interpretation - it can cause tissue damage and give rise to the same cascade of inflammatory responses that lead to eventual tissue repair, death, or both. The more appropriate term is nociception. Pregnant women who have high spinal cord injuries do not feel the pain of say a C-section by virtue of damage to the connecting neuronal pathways - however, any noxious stimuli (well, even an ingrown toenail in someone with a SCI, not necessarily a huge cut like a C-section) can still give rise to a chemical cascade that can cause extreme high blood pressure, sweating, tachycardia etc, something we term autonomic dysreflexia. They do not feel pain because they are unable to. But these women still get anesthetics for C-sections because the tissue response is still there, and it can lead to death.

Nociceptive pain is a subtype of pain and should not be confused with nociception. Then there is neuropathic pain, which occurs in the absence of physically noxious stimuli due to presumed neuronal damage, but people still feel it and it needs to be treated too.

I believe that even bacteria have nociception - any activation of a chemical pathway to a noxious stimuli is nociception. But do they feel pain? No.

I know very well the molluscs do not find it "comfortable" to be nucleated - even if it's just mantle tissue that is inserted, there still has to be an incision made. I cannot imagine someone cutting me and stuffing something into my gonads. That is tissue damage. And the prerogative of even the most primitive and non-sentient species would be to survive and propagate, which requires the genetic traits to enable it to regenerate despite moderate tissue damage. But pain in the absence of complicated neuronal pathways, I do not believe so. If this goes on any further it will probably turn into something along the lines of just because you can't prove it doesn't mean the God/devil doesn't exist. So I will not comment any further.