Sepia bandensis explores an arena with a visual cue signaling food reward. Stress produces negative judgement bias, leading to pessimistic assessment of intermediate cues. ©CrookLab
Congratulations to first author Sarah Giancola-Detmering, whose paper is out today in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. Sarah’s paper, “Stress produces negative judgement bias in cuttlefish” modifies a common assay for assessing affective state in vertebrate animals and applies to a cephalopod for the first time. This project is part of the growing applied welfare focus of our lab.
Sarah’s study demonstrates that cuttefish subject to ongoing stressful husbandry practices (impoverished housing and daily restraint) exhibit a pessimistic judgement bias compared with control animals. By training cuttlefish to associate a striped visual cue with food availability, Sarah shows that intermediate cues are interpreted as likely signaling food in control animals but less likely in stressed animals. Cognitive- and judgement-bias tests are used as standard welfare assessment methods in zoos, aquariums and research labs for vertebrate animals, and here we show that the same methods can reveal welfare state and affect in a cephalopod.
This is the first demonstration that cuttlefish have the capacity for negative affective states, and also shows that husbandry refinements can have a large impact on animal welfare for cephalopods. Our work on cephalopod welfare is shaping standards of care and regulatory oversight around the world, and we expect that this important paper will provide further evidentiary support as these oversight structures are continually refined.
Congratulations Sarah!