Cricket Consciousness

The other day I was trying to feed my gecko when I ran into some problems. Normally it's super easy, I keep the crickets in a cricket pen and the pen has these black tubes that the crickets naturally want to go into. I usually just take the black tube out knock it against the wall of the terrarium and they fall out... boom gecko fed. But the other day none of the crickets were in the pen so I was decided I'd have to get some crickets out with my hands... They were all super scared, naturally, and then i noticed this one little cricket that was missing a leg frantically limp running away looking super helpless. Then one of the larger crickets in the pen got on top of the handicapped cricket and was protecting him! It made me think about when we discussed consciousness earlier in the quarter and made me really believe that all animals including insects want to live just as much as we do.