Mealworm (Tenebrio molitor) production for food and feed is expanding rapidly, and developing appropriate welfare standards requires grappling with genuine uncertainty about insect sentience.
Mealworm welfare sits at the frontier of animal welfare science - the honest answer is that we do not know with certainty whether mealworms experience pain or suffering in morally significant ways. They have the neural hardware for nociception, show protective behavioural responses to tissue damage, and some research suggests rudimentary learning. Given this uncertainty, a precautionary approach argues for applying reasonable welfare measures: appropriate substrate, clean environments, optimal temperature and humidity, and effective killing methods before processing. The welfare cost of these precautions is trivial compared to the potential moral cost of inflicting suffering on billions of animals if they do experience something morally significant.