More importantly arthropods are far too tasty to worry about whether they feel pain up to the point they are dismembered and cooked with a delicious array of spices.
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Except for maybe how we owe most of our agriculture to them, the unappreciated and unfairly endangered bees.
Iāve seen enough variation in how people react to butterflies and moths not to believe that for a second. Even among people who donāt empathize much with the former, youāre still much more likely to see appreciation than the kill-it-with-fire you get here.
As for empathy, though, mine isnāt reserved for those who reciprocate but for anything capable of suffering. We have, you know, discussed that before; but to recap, I think itās as deeply dishonest to pretend an arthropod is just a computer as to pretend it is a person. Living things are on an evolutionary continuum; my negative response to stimuli ultimately comes from the same place as the centipedeās. The one is much more significantly developed but there is no hard line to make one real and the other not.
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I canāt find itā¦ and Iām wondering now if I heard it on Quirks and Quarks when this study came out, but theyāve also found that if you administer a shock to a crab or lobsters leg, they will for several hours rub the spot you shocked, and favour that leg. Which to me, demonstrates āpainā.
Also, just in case people are starting to think Iām a vegan or somesuch, Iām not, not in the least. I just think that if we are going to eat animals then we have a duty to ā¦ torture the as little as possible. And quite possiblyā¦ not torture them at all. Temple Grandin has some excellent ideas about how to do this with cows. Iām sure we can come up with a way to do this for all our food animals.
Edit to add: @chenille found it! Yay! Thank you! I knew there was a thing! 
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Linguistic ability able to explain the pain in an intelligent manner is the most convincing metric. Itās kind of the only real way to be sure. Barring that, you can make reasonable assumptions that animals with a similar brain structure to humans may experience something akin to our pain. Which kind of correlates with how most people feel some empathy with mammals, somewhat less with birds, and not much with invertebrates. My point isnāt that invertebrates are useless ā obviously many play an important role in the environment and some are pretty to observe, but it isnāt just a case of being not being ātaughtā to appreciate them in the way we appreciate mammals.
Ok, I donāt like 1080p video anymore, too much detail, that lizardās headā¦ 
Also, if any video didnāt need music added to it to make it scary, it was this one. Actually, watching it with the sound off is just as bad.
I can agree with that spectrum, with exceptions, but itās still only tangential to how people react to things. Consider how tardigrades and Opisthoteuthis are met with comments celebrating them as delightful, mantis shrimp as spectacular, and spiders and centipedes as needing to be erased from the earth even as photographs.
And for the record, I donāt actually think people would react to sapient scolopendroid aliens quite the way they do to bugs they never learned to like. If they behaved enough like us, it might even end up closer to how people have reacted to different-looking humans they never learned to appreciate. You know.
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The mother pholcus phalangioides is fiercely protective of her monstrous brood. This one lived in my bathroom while she was raising this brood and the next one, and then migrated to a corner in the staircase after that to raise another one. She disappeared after that, but apparently the females can live several years. With a macro shot like this, you can identify individuals by the dark brown shape on their carapace.
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I, for one, welcome insects bundling their obscene young into a compact, easy-to-burn ball
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Itās a centipede. Letās not contribute the legs race.
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They are amazingly fast tooā¦you wouldnāt know it how they hardly move.
When something flies into their web or even near it, bam, in a flash of movement they are suddenly sitting beside a fully wrapped cocoon.
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Centipedes and scorpions freak me right the fuck out (millipedes are fine for some reason and Iād let them crawl over me all day). But I have to admit, the mothers and their babies can be pretty cuteā¦ doesnāt hurt that baby scorpions are called scorplings.
I still donāt want them within a five mile radius, though.
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The Horror, The Horror.
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Millipedes are fine because they just want to eat veggies and fruit and walk around s-l-o-w-l-y (they make swell pets and I miss mine).
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Are they curled inside a cup or a 44 gallon trash barrel?
Itās a cooling tower.
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Ya know, Iād go āewwā here,but having seen, live, a mama scorpion with babies (lots and lots of babies) crawling all over her, well, Iām a bit inured.
Edit: that said, I aināt gonna look at that vid, nu-UH!
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So, do the ghastly-pallid little centipedes just absorb nightmare fuel fumes from the atmosphere and gradually expand to full size?
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Sorry, this reminds me of watching a large tomcat who had destroyed two legs on one side of a large roach. He was getting his jollies simply by watching the thing run in a circle at which point heād bat at it, ya know, to keep it running.
Yes .asdkfja;sdljfa;
But satisfaction brought him back.
