Slugs preferred by animal researchers with a conscience?
May 29th, 2008 by admin
The National Institutes of Health supports centers located at academic institutions nationwide that breed and make available for research a variety of animals including chimpanzees and monkeys, pigs, mice, zebrafish and salamanders. This week the Miami Herald profiled the National Resource for Aplysia, which is based at the University of Miami (aplysia californica is the scientific name of large sea slugs, relatives of snails and conch). The federally-funded center breeds and ships 30,000 of the slugs each year to researchers around the world.
The jury is still out on slugs capacity to feel pain, although other mollusks like octupus and squid are believed to be more neurologically-advanced. But apparently the big slugs are diffferent enough from other animals that they are preferred by some researchers. The Herald article quoted Linda Gorman, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who buys several hundred of the slugs every year from UM. She said, ‘’I didn’t want to use animals that squealed or had a lot of red blood running around.”