Folks, I'm very perplexed why farmed shrimp sentience hasn't been scientifically studied much more.
Correct me if I'm wrong but most of our data on the topic is based on another shrimp species about as evolutionarily distant from what's most commonly eaten as sharks are from humans.[1]
In other words, our current data leaves a lot of room for doubt. So what gives? I heard farmed shrimp species are tough to study but surely their scale, hundreds of billions farmed annually, makes it worth more shots?
But I tried and failed to find a way I could pay professionals to just generate more data on this topic. Y'all are about to make me act up and start experimenting on shrimp myself 😤
P.s. this post was written at 4am. A more mature me at 6am just wanted to clarify I don't intend on hurting shrimp but am still frustrated.
- ^
ChatGPT 5.2 confirmed: "Farmed 'shrimp' are commonly penaeids (Dendrobranchiata), while Palaemon is in Pleocyemata. One molecular-timescale source places the Dendrobranchiata–Pleocyemata split around ~437 million years ago. A widely cited estimate for the human–shark last common ancestor is about ~440 million years ago."
A few months later I revisited this question with Claude Opus 4.8 and mostly affirmed my conclusion (that there is a ton of uncertainty and lack of testing on farmed shrimp sentience) but it added some nuance as you can see here:
"divergence time is a poor proxy for whether sentience-relevant traits are conserved (we correctly infer shark and zebrafish nociception across a similar gap), so the ~437 My [Million years] isn't the real issue.
The issue: shrimp sentience estimates lean on crabs — Rethink Priorities' ~0.43 assumes shrimp equal crabs — and the one positive prawn pain-marker failed to replicate in penaeids. The transfer is assumed, not shown, and failed its one direct test."