Do Bass Feel Pain???

[Deacon]

I was stumbling around on another message board and found this....

There has always been the great debate if bass feel pain as we know it. I thought this was a very good read and really informative.


Do Fish Say Ouch?

By Dr. Keith Jones, Director of Fish Research at Berkley

There is perhaps no more reflective issue in fishing than the subject of pain. Not so much ours but that of the fish. Do fish really feel pain, and if so how much do they feel? Do they scream in agony at a good hookset, or do they feel no more tan a potato does when being cut up for French fries?

Ultimately, the question would best be answered by a person living as a bass - to feel how it feels - if only for a moment. I don't know about you, but I'm not eager to swap brains with a bass.

Humans, of course, feel pain. In fact, we feel it quite well. But it's important to note a few things about human pain. First, pain is not simply any feeling. Pain has a perceptual quality all its own. At mild levels it may sometimes get confused with other sensations like touch, warmth, and cold, but a good solid dose of pain feels like nothing else but pain.

Second, pain is not merely intense feelings derived from stimulating our other sensations too strongly. In other words, our feeling of pain at the sudden blast of a loud noise or the burning of our hand doesn't come through our sense of hearing or the temperature receptors in our skin.

In fact, the sensation of pain is mediated by it own distinct set of unique receptors located in the skin, muscles and some internal organs.

Moreover, pain receptors feed their message into the brain via specific and distinct nerve pathways. These pathways travel up the spinal cord, are relayed through our brainstem (what some scientists refer to as the "primitive brain"), and eventually project forward to an area called the cerebral neocortex. The neocortex is the highly complex, squiggly surface portion of our brain that you see so much in brain photographs.

It is in the neocortex, with its billions of nerve cells and trillions of nerve connections, that our perception of "pain" is actually born. Using mass numbers of nerve cells devoted specifically to pain impulses, the neocortex processes the neutral message from the pain receptors to produce the feeling pf pain. Without our cerebral neocortex, we could feel no pain.

Unlike humans, however, fish totally lack a cerebral neocortex... as I wrote a couple of months ago about a bass' learning ability. And without a cerebral neocortex fish are left holding the short end of the neural stick when it comes to perceiving human type pain.

Does that mean fish feel nothing at all when an angler sets the hook? Obviously not, since otherwise they would hardly show the struggling actions that they do. Clearly, fish feel something, and that something must either have a negative quality or is weird enough in the brain to automatically trigger escape behavior. However, merely feeling "something" is a far cry from feeling "pain."

Again, the only way we will ever truly know for sure is to step into the fish's neural shoes and feel what it feels. If fish feel any sort of pain then they assuredly do not feel pain like we feel pain, any more than they see like we see or hear like we hear. Fish pain, if real, is likely to be much less defined, much cruder than our own sensations.

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From: http://www.ausfish.com.au/vforum/showthread.php?t=53846



For those interested, I have posted what I put together as a result of my research below.


DO FISH FEEL PAIN: FACT VS. FICTION

Pain is defined as having two components (Cambridge dictionary online). The first is sensory, the feeling of physical suffering caused by injury or illness, and is also known as nociception. The second is affective, which is the emotional or mental suffering.

One of the functions of sensory component of pain is to sense damage so action can be taken to avoid further damage. Pain receptors are free nerve endings connected to the central nervous system by both AƒÔ-fibers and C-fibres. There are mechanical, thermal and chemical pain receptors. From here the pain can be relayed to the thalmus, in which pain perception occurs, and then the signal travels to the somatosensory cortex in the cerebrum, at which point the individual becomes fully aware of the pain.

All vertebrates possess the primitive areas of the brain to process nociceptive information (thalmus), but the size of the cortex decreases down the evolutionary tree, with fish having only a rudimentary cortex, and only only mammals have the neocortex ¡V the thinking area of the cortex. The fishes brain is dominated by brainstem components and features very primitive cerebral hemispheres. Indeed, in fish a higher level of cortical sensory interpretation appears non-existent, since fish behaviour is unaffected by cortical damage. Pain and consciousness depend on very specific brain regions, namely specialized neocortical region of the cerebral hemispheres. The neocortex is absent in fish and there are no likely alternative systems to perform the same tasks. Consequently, there is no basis for assuming that a fish might have a capacity for consciousness or pain.

Reactions to noxious stimuli are present in all forms of animal life, but these responses do not mean that pain is experienced. For example, the single celled ameba will move away from irritating chemical or mechanical stimuli. These reactions are automatic because the ameba does not have a nervous system. Similarly, the starfish moves away from noxious stimuli but has only a few nerve cells and no brain. These animals can percieve noxious stimuli, but cannot feel pain.

There is no doubt then that fish can percieve and react to noxious stimuli Experiments have shown that trout possess receptors on the head and neck able to detect noxious stimuli such as mechanical pressure, temperature and chemical stimuli. Behavioural chhanges have also been observed to occur after noxious stimuli (Sneddon et al., 2003 Proceedings of the Royal Society London, Series B 270: 1115-1121). This study proves only that fish can react to noxious stimuli. It does not prove that fish experience pain.

It is the brain where the pain signals are processed and experienced, not the peripheral nervous system. The reaction to noxious stimuli is not the same as the psychological experience of pain, and the former does not prove the latter. Indeed, human experiments have proven that pain is experienced in the brain (eg coma, anaesthesia) and the sensation of and reaction to noxious stimuli can occur without the experience of pain.

In conclusion, fish can percieve and react to noxious stimuli such as a fish hook by trying to get away. This is a flight response (protective reaction) which is the result of brainstem and spinal patterns of activity that are automatically elicited by the stimulation of being hooked. There is no evidence however that they can process these signals as pain and experience the physical and physhological feelings of pain as we know it. In fact, the anatomy of the fishes brain suggests that they cannot.

Acknowledgements:
The information contained in the report above was taken from a number of sources publically available on the internet including:
www.cotrout.org/do_fish_feel_pain.htm
http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/pain/mi.../culture2.html
http://www.vet.ed.ac.uk/animalwelfac...0pain/pain.htm
http://www.nature.com/news/2003/0304.../030428-0.html

Further reading:

Rose, J.D. 2002. The Neurobehavioral Nature of Fishes and the Question of Awareness and Pain. Reviews in Fisheries Science. 10(1): 1-38.

[JB]

Great Article
Deacon, wb

[Deacon]

I never left...I just lurked! Always in the shadows watchin! LOL. Besides someone has to keep a eye on Zook!

[MississippiBoy]

Interesting stuff. Good call, deacon.