Scallops are farmed bivalves that respond to stimuli and can swim to escape predators — their welfare status is uncertain but their responses raise questions worth considering.
Scallop welfare sits at the edge of bivalve welfare discussions — their active escape responses suggest some form of threat detection, but this does not necessarily indicate subjective pain experience. The nervous system present in scallops is sufficient for stimulus detection and rapid motor response but falls far short of the complexity associated with conscious pain processing in vertebrates. For welfare-minded consumers, scallops represent a lower-concern animal protein than vertebrate or cephalopod species, while research into invertebrate cognition continues to develop the evidence base for more informed decisions.