Supporting research on the welfare of understudied animals.
Arthropods (insects, crustaceans, arachnids, and their relatives) make up most of the animal species on Earth. Humans farm them, manage them, and affect them in many ways. Yet we know remarkably little about their welfare: what they experience, how changes in their conditions affect them, and how to measure these shifts.
About
The Arthropoda Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization that supports scientific research on the welfare of understudied animals. The organization focuses on the arthropods but is open to proposals on other invertebrates.
Arthropod welfare raises questions of interest to many disciplines, including neuroscience, behavioral ecology, entomology, aquaculture science, veterinary science, and more. These questions go unanswered because they fall between the cracks of traditional funding bodies: too applied for some funders, too basic for industry, and too new for most. We aim to help scientists address them.
We support research through competitive grants, evaluated with a structured review process that weighs both scientific merits and the potential to inform future decision-making. We also run workshops for researchers and industry stakeholders to clarify where further research would be most valuable.
What We Fund
We fund basic research on questions like: Do arthropods experience pain? What do they find aversive or rewarding? What variation is there across life stages? (Negative evidence is as valuable as positive evidence, as both improve decisions. We look for well-designed studies whose results will be informative however they turn out.) Our applied interests are broad and include: the development and validation of welfare indicators; husbandry across the life cycle in production and research settings; handling, stunning, and slaughter methods; and the individual welfare impacts of management and other human activities on wild populations. We welcome proposals from any empirical discipline that can make progress on these questions.
For Researchers
If you're working on questions relevant to arthropod welfare, or you'd like to be, please consider applying. If you have questions, please reach out to the relevant program officer.
For Industry & Other Partners
Increasingly, producers, purchasers, and policymakers face questions about arthropod welfare that researchers have not yet answered. We work with industry and other stakeholders to identify research priorities and share decision-relevant findings.