Bivalve farming is often considered lower welfare impact than fin fish, but emerging research on bivalve sentience calls for precautionary consideration.
Bivalve welfare sits at the frontier of welfare science where the evidence for sentience is genuinely uncertain. The combination of distributed nervous systems, avoidance responses, and neurochemical similarity to vertebrates justifies precautionary consideration. Even if bivalve sentience probability is low, the scale of production - trillions of animals - makes precautionary handling meaningful.