Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith discusses octopuses as key figures in his reflections on non-human consciousness and intelligence. He addresses the social behaviors observed in octopus colonies as well as their capacity for emotion and communication. He also speaks about the challenges of animal protection and the limits of ethical responsibility. Godfrey-Smith emphasizes the need to develop new ways of thinking about value and the lives of non-human beings.

This article analyzes a passage from the seven­teenth-century agronomic treatise General Gentry Economy (1675) by Jakub Kazimierz Haur, in which the author offers a brief praise of the beehive as a model of a well-organized estate. Although at first glance the passage may appear to be a conventional reiteration of familiar observations about the cultural significance of the bee in early modern literature and thought, situating it within the broader context of the treatise reveals its function as a conceptual tool for articulating Haur’s views on the role of the steward, the nature of his labor, and the place of animals in political imagination.

I explore the relationship between humans and the freshwater mussel Unio tumidus from both ethnographic and ethical perspectives. These mussels are placed within the technological environment of water infrastructure, where their role is to help control the quality of water intended for human consumption. I investigate whether these interactions can be understood as labor relations, following Donna Haraway’s framework, or as exploitation, as conceptualized by Peter Singer’s utilitarianism. My aim is to contextualize these interspecies relationships within a broader framework that acknowledges each species’ unique knowledge, skills, and needs concerning water. This exploration also extends to the relationships among individuals whose work is intricately connected to water.

The article examines criminal law regulations related to the protection of invertebrate animals. It explores criminal offenses concerning both the humanitarian and species protection of animals. Particular emphasis is placed on the provisions of the Act of January 15, 2015, on the Protection of Animals Used for Scientific or Educational Purposes, which specifically safeguards a distinct category of invertebrates – living cephalopods. The article also identifies legal gaps and inconsistencies within current legislation. Furthermore, it analyzes the nature of crimes and offenses against animal protection, including those involving invertebrates under strict or partial protection, such as unlawful killing, capture, purchase, and smuggling.

The purpose of this article is to analyze two poems by Marianne Moore and Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, which textually process the encounters between humans and jellyfish. The author argues that both poets having described a variety of meeting places (water, beach) between human and non-human animals, experiment with a poetics of strangeness that evokes a sense of incompatibility between human and jellyfish. However, both poets propose poetic formulas such as the abandonment of intention and attentiveness that transform the lyrical personae of their poems into gestures of conscious relinquishment of the desire to touch and possess. Although the poems analyzed are anthropocentric, they embody an attitude that challenges the dynamics of human domination, possession and assertion of human position. According to the author, Moore and Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska realize it by creatively confronting the antithetical materiality of the jellyfish with the unstable and corporeal identity of the lyrical persona.

The article explores two distinct traditions of insect depiction in the late 16th century through a case study of nearly 40 entomological illustrations from Anselmus de Boodt’s Albums (housed in the Rijksmuseum). It compares artistic, trompe
l’œil miniatures of small animals – created by Elias Verhulst based on Joris Hoefnagel’s engravings – with the scientific, standardized entomological drawings by de Boodt himself. To illustrate the evolving expectations of natural historians regarding entomological illustrations, the article juxtaposes these works with earlier and contemporary illustrations. It traces a progression from illusionistic Netherlandish borders and German woodcuts depicting insects alongside human figures, through simplified sketches, to detailed representations of species observed through a magnifying glass. De Boodt’s Albums aim to strike a balance between illusionism and the standardization of entomological illustration in the late 16th century.

In Małgorzata Lebda’s works, bees and other insects play a pivotal role as carriers of relational meanings and as a symbolic space where human and animal worlds converge. Drawing on her experiences growing up in a beekeeping family and her close relationship with her father, Lebda constructs a literary vision centered on the interdependence of human and non-human beings. Bees in her poetry and prose serve not only as metaphors for communal life but also embody harmony and collaboration within an ecosystem encompassing all life forms. The interactions between her characters and bees reveal deeper truths about human existence: its fragility, the need for care, and shared responsibility toward the natural world. Thus, insects stand as a testament to the unity of life and emphasize the necessity of recognizing the interconnectedness binding humanity to its environment.

Waka poetry was the most important genre of classical Japanese literature and continues to be composed today, usually in the form known as tanka, or “short song,” from the second half of the 19th century onwards (consisting of 31 morae arranged in a 5-7-5-7-7 pattern). One of its central themes was nature, particularly those elements considered suitable for poetic expression. Among insects, the focus was primarily on those known for producing beautiful sounds, such as various types of crickets, but also on fireflies. In the pre-modern period, waka poetry began to exhibit realistic tendencies, expanding its subject matter and vocabulary – exemplified by the work of Tachibana Akemi (1812–1868).

This article first presents the use of insect motifs in earlier waka poetry as background, then discusses the depiction of insects in Tachibana’s poetry, with a focus on innovative themes (such as lice and ants) and realism.

The article explores the problem of poetically presenting animality without reinforcing the conventional human/animal distinction. The article argues that the poem addresses the issue of locating animality within Homo sapiens by its poetic rendering of an interaction between a dying human and an insect. The insect’s presence makes the vision of immortality inaccessible to the lyrical speaker. Locating animality is achieved by undermining heroic narratives, which leads to a fuller revelation of the human’s finitude. The animal within the human being turns out to be located in their finitude determined by the mortal biological constitution and embeddedness in a semiotic system.

Many scholars studying non-human animals and, more broadly, non-human subjects, highlight their capacity for resistance to human ordering imposed on them – even if this resistance might not be intentional. This article is dedicated to an analysis of field materials from ethnographic research on global invertebrate keeping prac­tices conducted between 2021 and 2023 in Poland, Thailand, Singapore, and Australia. The analysis reveals various ways in which invertebrates challenge the heteronormative beliefs of their caretakers, as well as the adaptive strategies that their keepers develop for the goal of the incorporation of queer bodies and behaviours of the invertebrates into contemporary Western norms regarding gender, sexuality, and interpersonal relations. Conversely, when the queer characteristics of invertebrates cannot be concealed, the strategy for maintaining heteronormativity shifts to alienating these subjects and capitalising on their queer attributes, which are perceived as peculiar, exotic, and intriguing.

The article analyzes subjective representations of insects in contemporary literature. The author focuses on narrative depictions of ways of establishing relationships with such uniquely different animals. She illustrates various writing strategies employed by Selja Ahava in her novel Nainen joka rakasti hyönteisiä (The Woman Who Loved Insects) and artistic approaches exemplified by the art book co-created with insects by Zhu Yingchun, The Language of Bugs.

Dino Buzzati, the best-known representative of twentieth-century surrealism in Italian literature, was fascinated by the world of fauna and flora. In articles published in leading Italian newspapers, he advocated for the rights of animals exploit­ed by humans. Buzzati’s interests also extended to invertebrates, as even the smallest creatures aroused his respect and admiration, becoming the subjects of his stories, novels, reports, and columns.

In classical Chinese literature, great importance has long been attached to the depiction of butterflies. Ancient texts contain narrative elements such as “Butterfly Dance,” “Butterfly Dream” and “Transformation into a Butterfly,” which, at the semantic level, form three main and relatively stable narrative types: the joy of contemplation, transformation through breaking the cocoon, and selfless, devoted love. These narrative modes developed gradually and in close mutual interdependence, while remaining deeply rooted in human nature, human society, and even interpersonal relationships. This paper conducts a retrospective analysis of extant literary works to trace the origins, characteristic features and cultural content associated with the butterfly image in Chinese classical literature. Furthermore, it also offers a multidimensional interpretation of this motif across different eras, cultural contexts, and individual authorial styles within the broader development of classical literature.

Individuals within a species perceive and respond to their environment differently, and each inhabits and creates its own unique Umwelt. Consistent differences in behaviour between individuals of the same species that persist over time or through contexts are known in behavioural ecology and comparative psychology as animal personalities. They arise as a result of random processes occurring during individual development and as a result of processing and integrating information transmitted from ancestors and collected throughout one’s life. To emphasize the role of the interaction of these factors operating on different time scales, it is proposed in this article to look at invertebrate personalities using Nikolaas Tinbergen’s four questions, but tracing evolution, ontogeny, cause and function along the axis of time and information flow. The insight into the literature presented here is also intended to support the acceptance of this common biological phenomenon and the term describing it.

Few consumers are aware that the so-called seafood comes from commercial aquaculture, where lobsters, crabs or shrimps and prawns are kept in cruel conditions of crustaceans factory farming. At the same time, the sentience and neurobehaviour of crustaceans continue to pose challenges for neurobiology, comparative cognition, and ethical reflection. Knowledge about the sentience of decapods, exploited in the food and entertainment industries (pet shops, fishkeeping hobbies, aquafarming), is particularly important for contemporary animal ethics and biopolitics in the context of condemning cruel breeding practices, proposing legal protection of decapods and enforcing welfare standards. For this reason, the article presents the foundation of the sentience phenomenon, which is the ability to experience pain in selected species of crabs, crayfish and prawns. The discussed cases of pain perception seem to be representative of the entire group of farmed decapods. The conclusions resulting from the experiments indicate all decapods should be included as soon as possible in international legal acts to limit brutal forms of breeding, transporting, and slaughtering them.

In this article, we present a high-level argument for ethical oversight for insect research. There is a realistic possibility that insects are sentient, and when there is a realistic possibility that an animal is sentient, we have a responsibility to consider welfare risks for them when making decisions that affect them. We also present high-level recommendations for how to achieve this goal. In addition to taking the issue seriously in general, researchers can develop methods for assessing welfare risks for insects, and we can also develop policies and procedures for making ethical decisions about insect research; these methods, policies, and procedures can be adapted from other kinds of animal research without being identical to them.