Insect meal — particularly from black soldier fly larvae — is replacing fishmeal in aquaculture feed. This raises questions about insect welfare at production scale while potentially improving the welfare of wild fish populations through reduced fishing pressure.
Insect protein production for aquaculture feed sits at a welfare ethics frontier: replacing one uncertain welfare problem (wild-caught forage fish) with another (industrially raised insects at enormous scale). The key difference is that forage fish are vertebrates with stronger sentience evidence, while insect sentience probability is lower. Under a probability-weighted welfare framework, replacing fishmeal with insect protein likely reduces welfare harm even under precautionary insect sentience assumptions. However, as insect production scales to billions of animals, even small probabilities of sentience warrant basic welfare consideration: appropriate thermal conditions, food, and killing methods that minimise potential suffering. The field of insect welfare is developing alongside insect agriculture.