Nobody is saying that fish are moral agents that can empathise with other beings. That doesn’t man that they’re not moral subjects; the ability to understand that one is causing harm is not a prerequisite for the ability to suffer oneself. I think everyone knows this intuitively, but it does feel good to have our less moral habits be justified by memes that we would otherwise find to be illogical.
(Nerd warning) So awesome to see strigolactones on lemmy. Any other strigolactone researchers out there? I mostly work on the receptor protein D14.