Pain’s Benefit to Squid May Hold Clues to Chronic Human Pain

For the longfin inshore squid, pain can mean the difference between life and death, according to a new study. That’s because pain prompts injured squid to behave in ways that help it survive encounters with a fish predator, researchers said.

That finding may also provide hints as to why other animals, including humans, experience long-lasting or chronic pain, behavior experts say.

It’s long been thought that pain causes an animal to act self-protectively, says Robert Elwood, an animal behavior researcher at Queen’s University Belfast who was not involved in the study. Pain teaches an organism to avoid situations that will bring it on. It seems obvious, but it hasn’t really been tested until now, Elwood said in an email interview.

In a study published today in Current Biology, researchers report that the sensitivity with which injured squid reacted to aggressive moves from a predator, in this case a black sea bass, gave the squid better odds of surviving an attack.

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