An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

by Ed Yong

A grand tour through the hidden realms of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world --from the Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of I Contain Multitudes.

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth's magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and humans that wield sonar like bats. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision. We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved.

In An Immense World, author and acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world we don't need to travel to other places; we need to see through other eyes.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Nature, Animals, Biology, Audiobook, Environment

464 pages, Hardcover

First published June 21, 2022

About the author

Ed Yong is a science journalist who reports for The Atlantic, and is based in Washington DC.

His work appears several times a week on The Atlantic's website, and has also featured in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, Nature, New Scientist, Scientific American, and many more. He has won a variety of awards, including the Michael E. DeBakey Journalism Award for biomedical reporting in 2016, the Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in the Public Communication of Life Sciences in 2016, and the National Academies Keck Science Communication Award in 2010 for his old blog Not Exactly Rocket Science. He regularly does talks and radio interviews; his TED talk on mind-controlling parasites has been watched by over 1.5 million people.

I Contain Multitudes, his first book, looks at the amazing partnerships between animals and microbes. Published in 2016, it became a New York Times bestseller, and was listed in best-of-2016 lists by the NYT, NPR, the Economist, the Guardian, and several others. Bill Gates called it "science journalism at its finest", and Jeopardy! turned it into a clue.

Ed cares deeply about accurate and nuanced reporting, clear and vivid storytelling, and social equality. He writes about everything that is or was once alive, from the quirky world of animal behaviour to the equally quirky lives of scientists, from the microbes that secretly rule the world to the species that are blinking out of it, from the people who are working to make science more reliable to those who are using it to craft policies. His stories span 3.7 billion years, from the origin of life itself to this month's developments in Congress. He makes terrible puns and regrets none of them. He has a Chatham Island black robin named after him.

Reviews

[Petra hiatus sort of exploring other net options]

Update This is a 10-star book. It is up for Goodreads Awards, I should really get round to a proper review s it's paradigm-changing. Makes you think in a different way. Maybe tomorrow....
__________

I've been in bed all day, reading with my one good eye had cataract surgery this morning. This book is definitely going to be a 10 star. It's main thrust is that all of us creatures see the world in quite a different way but that all of us think it is the only way. It is hard to imagine a world where a seal can follow a water trail much as a dog with a scent trail, where crocodiles have skin ten times more sensitive than to tiny pressure fluctuations than our fingertips. It is an entrancing book.

From the introduction,

Imagine an elephant in a room. This elephant is not the proverbial weighty issue but an actual weighty mammal. Imagine the room is spacious enough to accommodate it; make it a school gym. Now imagine a mouse has scurried in, too. A robin hops alongside it. An owl perches on an overhead beam. A bat hangs upside down from the ceiling. A rattlesnake slithers along the floor. A spider has spun a web in a corner. A mosquito buzzes through the air. A bumblebee sits upon a potted sunflower. Finally, in the midst of this increasingly crowded hypothetical space, add a human. Let’s call her Rebecca. She’s sighted, curious, and (thankfully) fond of animals. Don’t worry about how she got herself into this mess. Never mind what all these animals are doing in a gym. Consider, instead, how Rebecca and the rest of this imaginary menagerie might perceive one another.

and then goes on to explain how, with all their different senses the animals, see, hear, smell and trap or evade each other.

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality's fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.

The book is an elucidation of this introduction, the author sharing his enthusiasm, his writing full of warmth for all the animals who share the earth with us. I love books like this, where there is knowledge, enthusiasm and beautiful writing. A 10 star book for me, obviously!

[Nataliya · Rating 5 out of 5]

We know that many animals can sense and perceive the world in different ways than humans do, but it’s hard to imagine it, really, when we are used to rely on our own perception of the world.

“Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.”

Yong presents his discussion of animal perception through the concept of Umwelt: “Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world.” And it’s fascinating trying to think of the Umwelt of those who sense the world — trapped in my own Umwelt, I almost wrote see the world — though echolocation and electric and magnetic fields.

“The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.”

Did you know that zebra stripes have zero to do with camouflage, lions would be considered legally blind in the human world (and they can’t see these zebra stripes from hunting distance at hunting times) and scallops have many beautiful eyes which function as a version of security camera system? Did you know dolphins are basically living CT scanners? Did you realize how much we describe the world through visual metaphors? Or how many of our ideas of animals are based on our inability to perceive when they are communicating or engaging with their world because they are using senses or sensory ranges that are not within our own Umwelt?

“The first step to understanding another animal’s Umwelt is to understand what it uses its senses for.”

Ed Yong is a great narrator, able to present dense information in accessible, interesting and fun way. He makes the concepts understandable without oversimplifying. He hits my funny buttons all the time, and I love it — I mean, staying dead serious for several hundreds of nonfiction pages is *not* in my Umwelt.

“They punch their prey into submission. They punch anything that intrudes upon their burrows. They punch each other at first contact. Mantis shrimps throw punches like humans throw opinions—frequently, aggressively, and without provocation.
[…]
Imagine that you’re a mantis shrimp. It is a truth universally acknowledged that you are in want of something to punch.”

But then in the end of the book Yong brings in sobering seriousness. With humans not being able to perceive things other Earth inhabitants do it’s scarily easy for us to completely mess up other creatures’ day to day existence and survival even when we actually don’t mean to. All the extra light and sound that comes as a byproduct of our overpopulated overcrowded existence is extremely disruptive, but unless you think of it from the perspective of others’ Umwelten it may be hard to realize or remedy.

Wonderfully informative, well-presented and fascinating book. Easy 5 stars.

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Buddy read with Allie, Anna and Carol

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Also posted on my blog.

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world."

There's been a fair amount of rain the last few weeks where I live. Everywhere is lush green with myriad mushrooms bursting from the damp earth.

During our hikes, my partner keeps her eyes peeled for different fungal fruits (mushrooms) and I can't stop myself from taking gazillions of photos. She probably grows bored after a while but, sweet as she is, she never complains.

I ooh and aah and get down on the ground, seeking the perfect angle to snap photos and preserve these fragile fungi for as long as the chip in my phone exists.

At one point yesterday S. began laughing. She pointed out that while I might lack the ability to gush over human babies, as soon as I see cute mushrooms, insects, and lizards, I ooh and aah and baby-talk to them like most (normal) people do to tiny versions of our own species.

What can I say? She's got a point. But human babies are just so.... boring. They're all basically alike, red and squishy faced and belting forth an abominable sound over every little thing (except your baby, dear Reader, yours is different and beautiful, etc). Give me a spider any day.

I've long loved mushrooms but especially so after reading Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. The more I learn about the natural world, the more amazed I become, and the more I appreciate all the diverse forms of life around us.

An Immense World is full of interesting facts about the animals (other mammals, insects, fish, and birds) we share our planet with. Actually, maybe "share" isn't the correct word when we've stolen or destroyed so many habitats.

It's hard for us to imagine what the inner lives of other species are like, and we often think they see the world just as we do. This is a grossly mistaken assumption.

Each species has its own Umwelt, a German word meaning "environment" that is used to describe the specific part of an animal's perceptual world. The parts it senses and uses to eat, communicate, move around, find a mate, and protect itself.

Each animal's Umwelt is unique. Most humans' dominant sense is sight and, compared to most species, we have excellent vision (though many of us wear corrective lenses). We forget that some species don't see at all and the ones that do see in many distinct ways, experiencing different colours for instance, and levels of acuity.

I was frequently amazed by what I read in this book. It is packed full of interesting facts, things that make me appreciate the natural world even more.

Here's a tiny sampling:

• Catfish have taste buds spread over their entire bodies, "from the tips of their whisker-like barbels to their tails".

•"The eyes of the giant squid are as big as soccer balls."

•Scallops have eyes lining the inner edge of their shells, "dozens in some species, and up to 200 in others". That's a lot of eyeballs!


(Image: Close up of the blue eyes lining the shell of a scallop)

•Sea otters "have the densest fur in the animal kingdom, with more hairs per square centimeter than humans have on our heads".

•"Around 350 species of fish can produce their own electricity," which they use to create an image of their surroundings and to communicate with others.

I could go on. And on. My brain is whirling trying to remember all the cool things I learned in this book. Though we will never be able to experience the world exactly as other species do, we can learn as much as we can about how their senses work and try to imagine their specific Umwelts.

The author writes in an engaging manner which, along with how interesting it was, made this book a page-turner. He's witty at times and his awe for the natural world is prevalent throughout. There are copious notes that are not to be skipped.

Each chapter is dedicated to a different sense, some of which we humans do not have at all. They are: Smell and taste, sight with a separate chapter on colour, nociception (pain), temperature, touch, vibrations, sound, echolocation, electrolocation, and magnetoreception.

I recommend this book to all lovers of other species and to those who are concerned about preserving the habitats of all the diverse forms of life surrounding us. There are so many ways to experience the world and evolution has taken advantage of this, filling the world with a vast array of life.

[Elyse Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Audiobook….read by Ed Young
…..14 hours and 17 minutes

Elephants, insects, dogs, butterflies, rodents, squirrels, chipmunks, sea otters, frogs, bees, mosquitos, snakes, crocodiles, owls, whales, birds, bats, an electric catfish, kangaroos, spiders, the octopus, clams and other fishy species,
Surface vibrations, scents, sounds, poetic inspirations, tranquility, silence, magnetic fields, pigment sensitivity, ultra violet hues, echoes, fossils, trees, plants, oceans, waste, ……

Just how weird can our natural world be? We’ve earthy and colorful creatures sharing the planet with us humans….
It’s pretty extraordinary that scientist are able to study animal communications and behaviors in the way that they do…..

Ed Young gave us a fascinating—highly researched look at the way animals inhabit our world.

This lovely book opens our hearts — our empathy — and respect for animal life.
It’s quite beautiful to spend some time contemplating and learning about our wild wonderful creatures…seeing the world through an animals eye.

[Rosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a Nutshell: A great option for animal nonfiction lovers. Goes a bit too technical with scientific parlance at times, but most of the content is comprehensible to lay readers.

Humans have always tried to understand animals. However, one key thing that we either forget or don’t realise is that we try to use *our* understanding of the world to perceive *their* understanding of the world. Scientists have realised the flaw of this method, and have already begun the change in methodology for animal behaviour analysis, using the concept of Umwelt to understand animal behaviour rather than anthropomorphising them.

Umwelt is the German word for ‘environment’, and it denotes an organism’s sensory world. Our sensory world is dictated by our senses—the five that are commonly termed senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch) and the various other senses that we aren’t even aware of possessing (heat, pain, vibrations, balance,…) However, we all know that the senses aren’t standard across species. For instance, a dog perceives a fewer number of colours than humans, while birds perceive colours much beyond what we can. Does this mean that dogs know that they can see less and birds are aware that they can see more? Not at all – their Umwelten has always been the same. So seeing ultraviolet shades is perfectly routine for birds while we go ‘Wow!’ at the thought.

The book takes all of the common and most of the uncommon senses, and elaborates on each of them through multiple anecdotes and examples. The anecdotes come from various sensory biologists and their research experiences, which range from awe-inspiring to frustrating. Each chapter is dedicated to a specific Umwelt, and is supported by elaborate footnotes. (and I mean ‘elaborate’ in every sense – about a quarter of the book contains just the footnotes.) There is a strong underlying thread of humour throughout the content, courtesy not just the anecdotes but the author’s funny remarks about some of the facts/animals.

What I loved most about the author’s approach is that he never places any sense or animal above or below another, and is certainly not biased towards humans or human senses. The book’s primary focus is not on establishing superiority but on understanding the diversity of the natural world. More importantly, the agenda is very clear: the intention is not to seek a better understanding of our world by understanding other species first. Rather, it is to understand other species, period.

A plus point to the beautiful colour photo inserts, but a minus for having them in one clump at the end of the book (before the footnotes) rather than inserting them at the relevant spots within the related chapter. (This feedback is based on the Kindle version.)

Further on the flip side, the content gets a tad overwhelming at times, especially when it comes to providing data-based support. Some stats became too tedious, and some explanations too jargonistic. The writing style is also a bit jumpy at times as the author seeks to include as many instances as he can to support his point.

A bigger red flag personally was learning about some of the experiments & research methodology in use. A few experiments raised in my head the same old doubt: how far should humans go during animal research? I admire what the scientists seek to do, but advocating such research also feels like supporting cruelty. These experiments left me quite torn about my feelings. I couldn’t buy their argument that we humans are doing all this for the animals. No, humans are doing all this mainly for themselves. We want to learn more and more about everything around us, even if the learning comes at some cost to other species. This is not exactly a flaw in the writing, but a negative emotional impact of the content.

On the whole though, this is a treasure trove of information for every nature lover and to those curious about how senses (across species) function. Reading it will open your eyes (to the extent of their paltry four photoreceptor cones & rods) towards the vibrant diversity found in nature.

Definitely recommended if the subject matter interests you. Would suggest you read it a chapter at a time as it gets quite saturating otherwise.

4 stars.



 
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[Woman Reading · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ☆

"The only true voyage ... would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes ... to see the hundred universes that each of them sees."
---Marcel Proust

In An Immense World, Ed Yong takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey via the senses of the other species with whom we share this planet. Before completing this book, I would have rattled off the "fact" that humans have five senses and assumed that other animals possess the same number and type of sensory organs.

Yong immediately dispelled this presumption and then pointed out that animals across the species barrier experience different realities. The author shared a cool new word for this sensory bubble, the very particular portion of the world's complexity that each species can perceive --Umwelt.

[An] Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience -- its perceptual world.

... a multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten.

Most of us already have a vague understanding of this as dogs, one of the most popular pet species, can smell and hear more acutely than humans while their color perception is less rich than our vision. But that is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

The senses constrain an animal's life, restricting what it can detect and do. But they also define a species' future, and the evolutionary possibilities ahead of it.

The first step to understanding another animal's Umwelt is to understand what it uses its senses for.

In An Immense World, the reader will learn that some species can see ultraviolet colors, literally feel vibrations, navigate by the earth's magnetic field, or emit active electric pulses. It's a fascinating and freaky world out there, especially among the insect species.

Much of this book retained my interest but the chapter which created the greatest impression was about pain. Almost all animals can experience pain via a class of neurons called nociceptors. Nociception has long been present in the animal kingdom because the purpose of these sensors is to detect harmful and potentially life threatening stimuli. But not all animal species will feel pain in the same way nor necessarily react to the same stimuli. And even in humans, pain requires conscious awareness which leads to a subjective evaluation of pain.

An Immense World is an impressive book. Yong covered a great deal of territory as he hopscotched around the globe to a variety of scientists' labs and their test subjects. In fact, it kind of gave me whiplash as there was a lot of information. But if you're interested in comparing and contrasting animal species, this book will provide a terrific introduction to the extent of variety that exists on earth. If you're a general fan of pop science books, this book would also be a solid recommendation.

[Faith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best science books I have read. Read this if you are at all curious about how other animals experience the world. You probably weren’t aware that humans can echo-locate. But other animals are capable of so much more than we are. Their abilities are amazingly fine-tuned to meet their needs. All of the concepts and experiments were very clearly explained and the audiobook was expertly narrated by the author.

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Immense World by Ed Yong

It took an immense amount of time, more than usual, for me to read this. It is so packed with interesting information that I could only read a little at a time. Overwhelming, not always in a good way. Well written, but just too much.

[Olive Fellows (abookolive) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Divine.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Umwelt. A word I'd never heard until I picked up this book, but now it's a concept I've been regularly thinking about for the last several weeks. Umwelt is an animal's sensory bubble, the parts of its surroundings that it can sense and experience. The world is full of sights, textures, sounds, smells, electric fields…the list goes on. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of the immense world. As a result, many creatures could stand in the same physical space but have completely different experiences, completely different Umwelten.

Fascinating, right? Ed Yong does not hold back on the examples, and each chapter dives into different senses while introducing the reader to numerous captivating animals and the worlds they experience. Yong continuously makes the point that a human's Unwelt is limited, even though it doesn't feel that way, and we easily make the mistake in assuming every creature experiences the world in the same way, our way. They don't. But humans still tend to frame animals' lives in terms of our senses rather than theirs and unintentionally misinterpret the needs of the animals closest to us (if I had a dog, I would absolutely be going on more dedicated smell walks!). I came away from this book with so much food for thought, and it got me thinking differently about my perceptual world.

This book was no doubt enlightening. There are so many riveting examples of animals and how they use their senses that the reading experience actually got to be a little overwhelming. It was too much for me to absorb during the first read through, so I'm going to come back to the book in a couple years for a re-read in an attempt to soak up more fascinating tidbits about the animal world. I highly recommend this one to people who like being challenged to think about the world in different ways, and I can see it being particularly appealing to animal lovers too.

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Briefly - Simply fascinating - our senses are rather impoverished!

In full
WOW - Ed Yong, author and science journalist, takes us on a tour of senses and how the animal kingdom widely has developed and used senses. The introductory chapter got my attention very well. The idea of a room with many occupants of different species each with different primary senses. The range of what would be perceived by very varied species is remarkable and thought provoking. The author opens with some thoughts on the approach of this book. The idea is to avoid comparisons and "ranking". This does make sense for many reasons really. There are very widely differing habitats and difficulties in designing experiments when we don't have much of an understanding of the senses we are trying to test.

Throw in the difficulties of trying to decide just what senses there actually are and how to define and you get some feeling for the complexities being tackled in this book. I did like the quote from Proust - ""not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes". It felt appropriate.

I found the journey I was taken on was fascinating - almost to an overwhelming degree. When I'm reading a book to review I generally read just that book continuously. This one I took breaks from. In part there was just so much to process here (it wasn't a subject I knew much about). This is not a criticism of the book however. It is written in a very accessible way for something quite so complex.

While I mentioned that the book started with the idea that it was not going to make comparisons and ranking of senses I do think it "failed" on the comparisons aspect. However it would be virtually impossible to write this book about senses within a species without referring to the senses that are predominant in another species. I didn't find that this bothered me.

It's hard to come up with one or two favourite topics in this book - there were just so many for me. The sheer sensitivity of some animal senses just blew me away. That owls have asymmetric ears that are accurate to 2 degrees. That otters and seals can track the "wake" left by fishes from 200 yards away. That birds hear bird song very differently from us and that the song varies in ways we simply cannot hear. That turtles have inbuilt location senses that are remarkable. There is simply so much in here to be fascinated by.

I found the last chapter is quite brief but very interesting. It did feel slightly out of sync with the rest of the book. It concerns the way we disrupt animal senses in some quite dramatic fashions. For me it was a subject that could have had more space devoted to it - maybe another book!

This really is not a book to rush. It deserves time to be taken over it and will reward the interested reader amply. For me the fact that in most cases our senses are relatively poor was an overarching aspect of this. Related to that is the fact that, certainly in the past, we have attempted to judge animals senses by what we think they might be like. This is simply so far from the mark in so many cases as to emphasize how little we know and understand about this world we inhabit and abuse. This is a fascinating insight into the diversity of animal senses - I'd happily recommend it to anyone with any interest in the subject.

Note - I received an advance digital copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for a fair review

[Montzalee Wittmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful! Rtc!

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating look at what are the senses and how they are as a means for life on this earth both animals and plants. In general there are 5 human senses. Some animals have more. In order to begin to comprehend the world, we have to be cognizant of the fact that most living things view the world differently. When I say view, I mean that literally not subjectively. This was a great book, my only reduction came from the fact that Yong warns us not to anthropomorphize animals when we try to understand how they view the world then he proceeds anthropomorphize animals to try to explain how they view the world to a group of humans who are not scientists in this field. No I have no idea how he could have done it differently, I just reflexively reject the "do as I say not as I do" mentality.

4+ Stars

Listened on to Audible. Ed Yong narrated he was very good. He knows the material well. I would not say his performance elevated the material, but it did not detract from it.

[Matt (Fully supports developing sentient AGI) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful work, but why did they choose a monkey for the cover? They really should have gone with the Elephant Fish because that shit is crazy. Whip smart, social, and communicates/navigates/feeds by a constant self-generated symphony of electrical fields.

My only real complaint - It's Domain and even Kingdom-centric. Dare we dream of the umwelt of the largest life form on the planet? Or the oldest? Or the most numerous? I'm guessing there's a paucity of data, and maybe even interest. Too early, too alien.

[Wick Welker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Your world is one of many.

This book is a staggering achievement of cataloguing the various and clever ways the animal world has evolved its senses to perceive the surrounding world. And Umwelt is the sensory perception of any given organism and Yong makes it pretty clear that every creature has a particular and unique umwelt. You'll not just explore the traditional five human senses but you'll be opened up to the myriad ways that animals sense: echo location, proprioception, nociception and electromagnetic. This book will remind you that evolutionary life is a rare and precious thing full of science fiction wonder far greater than any writer can make up. Toward the end of this book we also get a reminder about the infringement on sensory perception of animals that human's inflict on nature particularly through noise and light pollution.

[K.J. Charles]

I think perhaps my expectations were too high--Mr KJC was raving about this for days--because this wasn't as mind-blowing as I had anticipated. Definitely interesting, with a huge amount of information on how different animals sense things in different ways (which honestly I had expected to be the case so the bare fact of it is surely kind of a given? Although there's plenty in here to suggest people have been assuming animals operate by humanlike senses for years, so maybe not.)

Quite a lot of disturbing animal cruelty in the history of experiments, very depressing last chapter about how we're wrecking the planet and ruining it for everything we share it with.

[Dennis · Rating 3 out of 5]

An Immense World is a well-written book by Ed Yong, whom I’ve enjoyed hearing discuss covid on NPR over the past couple years, and is scheduled for publication June 21st.

It’s an immense book, also, filled with examples of various animals and their senses from sight and sonar to electric and magnetic fields, and the ways humans try to learn about them. I’m not very interested in the scientific details (cells, neurons, rods, cones, whatever) of how something works, but rather in the variety of results in how the animal relates to the world. The author does a good job of mixing these aspects so that my eyes would only glaze over briefly.

I often found myself looking up photos of the animals being written about, such as when I wanted to see a scallop’s dozens of (often bright blue) eyes. Apparently, many species can see the ultraviolet light which we can not--we like to think we see the world accurately, but we’re really just another species like all of them, who use their senses to live in a species subjective world. The author makes the point that this is not a book about ranking or superiority, but about diversity, and that all creatures have worth in themselves, quoting a passage about animals from Henry Beston which I’ve always loved. And yet . . .

When encountering new facts about an animal, I’d often think how fascinating it was. If you like the subject and accept it at face value, you’ll enjoy the book. But thinking of the experiments needed to learn those facts, I’d be reminded of how humans regard the planet and all life on it merely as objects to be manipulated. If a person uses other people that way, they’re considered narcissistic, sociopathic, self-centered, egotistical, etc. I don’t believe there’s a meaningful difference when the attitude is directed toward other forms of life. Sure, cool facts, and occasionally we even use those facts to try to solve a problem we created, but I would have been a lot happier living in a society which had fewer cool facts about other forms of life and more respect for that life. That society probably wouldn’t have created the problems in the first place.

In the final chapter, the author moves away from particular senses and examples to a bigger picture. He justly bemoans the damage our species has done to the planet and the interference done to animals’ lives inadvertently, but all of the previous chapters are about interference done deliberately. Conveniently, it turns out that he considers our ability to try to figure out other animals our greatest sensory skill and that we must choose to do so (to give credit, he does acknowledge it’s not something we’ve earned). So much for other animals having worth in themselves—their lives are ours to control.

He also mentions that he agrees with Cronon’s famous essay about the word wilderness and how it affects the human/nature relationship. There have been many rebuttals and clarifications about that essay over the years, all of it is just human-centered wordplay, but I have to comment. Sure, if you have a backyard, it’s a form of nature you can find wonder in, and it should be respected and treated with care. It may be wilderness for an insect, but a grizzly bear or a wolverine can’t live there. I lived in Yellowstone for four years, and to claim that everywhere is wilderness and there is no qualitative difference in the value of different locations is simply foolish. People are dependent on and should live as a part of nature, but most in this country don’t. When people try to spend as much of their lives as possible removed from nature, it’s disingenuous to claim that people are a part of it when it’s convenient to the argument.

To sum up, a lot of information about animal senses and how those senses affect how the animals live (or evolutionarily vice versa), and a lot of concern expressed about them and the planet. The concerns are valid but they don’t question the status quo deeply enough. It’s like being meticulous about recycling while living a high consumption lifestyle, or only eating free range chickens—it might make you feel better, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem. People who have an interest in animals but believe people are more important than anything else will enjoy the book. People who don’t share that opinion will learn a lot of details but be left unsatisfied.

Thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the advance copy to review.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Umwelt. It's a German word for our perceptual world. We all have one. It encompasses all our senses, and not just the physical ones. So, mine might not be yours, and mine might not be mine from a while ago.

This book is about other, non-human critters and their Umwelten. A sighted human walks in a room and generally sees first, vision being our predominant sense. If we smell something, feel something, our eyes are drawn toward it. A dog, on the other paw, smells first, and not just identifying another dog's pee around the mailbox post, but a history, memory, and more. Electric eels send out voltage, though not necessarily to kill. It's their way of sensing what's around them. And don't even get me started about Octopuses.

So, this was fascinating, and got me annoying people for the the last few weeks with stuff I learned, in bullet-point fashion:

- Dogs have a facial muscle that can raise their inner eyebrows, giving them a soulful, plaintive expression. This muscle doesn't exist in wolves. It's the result of centuries of domestication, in which dog faces were inadvertently reshaped to look a bit more like ours.

- When the biologist E.O. Wilson daubed oleic acid onto the bodies of living ants, their sisters treated them as corpses and carried them to the colony's garbage piles. It didn't matter that the ant was alive and visibly kicking. What mattered was that it smelled dead.

- Imagine if your entire body became delicate to the touch whenever you stubbed your toe: That's a squid's reality.

- A blindfolded rattlesnake that's sitting on your head could sense the warmth of a mouse on the tip of your outstretched finger.

- Elephants make communicative sounds below a frequency that humans can hear; rats and other rodents communicate at a frequency above what we can hear.

- Despite the common idiom, bats aren't blind.

- You can't tickle yourself.

- That Tribute in Light, the annual art installation that commemorates the terrorist attack of 2001, with ascending beams standing in for the fallen Twin Towers, coincides with the autumnal migration season, and waylays around 1.1 million birds.

And my favorite:

- There are colors we cannot see. It depends how many cones we have in our brains (to make a long story short). Most humans have three cones (trichromatic) which brings out the warmth of reds and yellows. Dogs and color-blind people are dichromatic and don't see that. But there are species (birds, butterflies, insects) that are tetrachromatic and see ultraviolet hues that we can only imagine. A few humans are tetrachromatic and the author found one . . . but she didn't want to talk about it.

Now, if you'll excuse me, my Zugunruhe is kicking in. That's my migration anxiety. It's my Umwelt, what can I say.

[Nicola Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read Ed Yongs previous book (I contains multitudes, a book I loved- as a microbiologist, it hooked me) I was so excited to read this new one: An immense world. And it did not disappoint!

It’s on such an interesting topic. How the senses of animals give us a glimpse into a unseen realm, one of which we all perceive differently. We live in a world that we all experience in a different way depending on our senses and the picture that builds around us.

This book introduces the concept of ‘Umwelten’ which I just loved. So many things were new to me and I learnt so much. If you’re expecting a cut and dry guide to the senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight, you won’t get that here! Instead? Ed Yong brings the senses to life. He walks you through a word seen through the eyes of another. From different species who perceive the world in extraordinary ways. He takes you out of the human perspective, and into that of a different sense.

There was also a great addition in how the anthropocene (the current age of humans) and how we are changing our environment and how that’s related to affecting wildlife. From the lights bamboozling senses to strange molecules and environmental disruptions and what that means for different species.

It’s written brilliantly and is so engaging. Right when I picked it up and dived into the first few pages, I knew it was going to be a five star read. It’s beautifully written and a perfect example of how non fictions should be. It’s perfect for those who don’t have much background in science and is bound to engage and mystify you. I devoured the pages and banked a lot of amazing knowledge along the way!

Seriously couldn’t recommend enough.

Thank you to the author and publishers via NetGalley for this book in return for my honest thoughts and review.

[Camelia Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zhuangzi, a 4th century BC Chinese philosopher, and his friend Huizi, a court officer, went for a walk. While strolling on a bridge over River Hao, they had following conversation:

Zhuangzi: “Look, the fish are swimming. That’s the joy of fish!”
Huizi: “You are not a fish. So, from what do you know the joy of fish?”
Zhuangzi: “You are not me. So, from what do you know whether I know the joy of fish?”
Huizi: “I am not you, so I can not know what you know. You are not a fish, so you can not know the joy of fish.”
Zhuangzi: “The thing is, when you asked me how I knew about the joy of fish, you already knew that I knew this in order to ask me the question. I knew it from being on the bridge over River Hao!”

Whether we can know the Joy of Fish is a metaphor, but it is also a reality. After reading An Immense World, I understand that humans will never truly, fully know the inner, sensory world of animals. Armed with scientific tools and methods, under the correct mindset, and after careful, patient observations and studies, we can have glimpses into the Umwelt of animals. This is a book about those glimpses.

I like the idea of Umwelt very much. The word was invented by the Baltic-Germen zoologist Jakob von Uexkull in 1909. It comes from the German word for “environment” but it doesn’t just mean the surroundings of the animal. Instead, it refers to the perceptual world of the animals, those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience by itself. Umwelt is the opposite of the observer(i.e. human) centric world.

The book is organized by senses. There are many mind-blowing discoveries. I am not going to repeat here. This book is such a pleasure to read that I feel sorry when it ends. In the chapter about sensing the earth’s magnetic field, Ed Yong explained what quantum physics and a group of molecules called cryptochromes from which radical pairs are formed do in songbirds. The explanation is much clearer than what I've seen elsewhere, but it gives me more questions: what exactly is this radical pair molecule? Why do they even exist? I thought particles in quantum physics need to be miniscule and quantum computing requires very cold temperatures? Imagine a migrating songbird actually “seeing” the earth’s magnetic field, how cool is that!

The writing is excellent. Ed Yong is one of my favorite science writers. I got my copy signed at the National Book Festival.

Table of Content:
Leaking Sacks of Chemicals - Smells and Tastes
Endless Ways of Seeing - Light
Rurple, Gruple, Yurple - Color
The Unwanted Sense - Pain
So Cool - Heat
A Rough Sense - Contact and Flow
The Rippling Ground - Surface Vibrations
All Ears - Sound
A Silent World Shouts Back - Echos
Living Batteries - Electric Fields
They Know the Way - Magnetic Fields
Every Window at Once - Uniting the Senses
Save the Quiet, Preserve the Dark - Threatened Senscape

[L.G. Cullens · Rating 5 out of 5]

An immense and varied world indeed! To me this book highlights just how little of our world we can actually and realistically perceive, trapped in our limited senses and mental faculties (our Umwelt) like all other creatures. Add to that our biases which distort the reality of what we perceive and you might get an inkling of why we create the dilemmas we do.

"Nature is not about superiority but about diversity."

Recommended reading.

[John Devlin · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I had just finished Song of the cell and was equally gobsmacked on how nature micro manages animal senses down to the molecular level.

Yong does a good job of weighing suppositions against humans desire to anthropomorphize animals.

There are fascinating details on how animals taste, hear, and see. How bats and dolphins both use echolocation but how the medium that these mammals exist in creates radically different uses.

But here’s my lament with this book and what it epitomizes.
These so called scientist are rather stupid because they invariably lament man. Well, man of a certain time - today’s version.

As Yong writes, ‘amid this already dispiriting ledger of ecological sins”. The whole last chapter is a litany of leftist Cant, even Rush Limbaugh gets it in a footnote, “Rush Limbaugh spewing bile”
Really, Mr Yong?

Well try this. The only reason ANY of this exists is because of greedy, evil capitalism.

“ Speiser ran an experiment that he called Scallop TV. He strapped their shells to small seats, placed them in front of a monitor, and showed them computer-generated movies of small, drifting particles.” Or this, “a ridge in Idaho that acts as a stopover for migrating birds, the team set up a half-mile corridor of speakers and played looped recordings of passing cars. At the sound of these disembodied noises, a third of the usual birds stayed away.”

This book alone lists of dozens of crazy experiments that have no value past the fact that one semi-furry primate happened to be curious, and oh yeah, started creating so much wealth that folks could be “ a guy who studied the mites that hang out in the nostrils of hummingbirds”

So 99% of the experiments these guys do will never help one person, only capitalism, and it’s benefactors allows for folks to spend their lives studying insect minutiae.

To make matters worse, here’s a perpetual refrain, “Hundreds of studies have come to similar conclusions.”
Oh, so great we’re spending more money to prove something already proved to death.

Also, here’s another fun fact for mr Yong, “With microscopes, cameras, speakers, satellites, recorders, and even paper-lined cages with inkpads at their bases, people have explored other sensory worlds. We have used technology to make the invisible visible and the inaudible audible.”

Right, all the devices that these scientists rely on were made by capitalism. No one created satellites so we could understand how birds react to the magnetosphere.

Finally, the year is nearly over. So I can confidently predict this statement will win the most self involved comment.

When talking about how cities light up the area,
“The thought of light traveling billions of years from distant galaxies only to be washed out in the last billionth of a second by the glow from the nearest strip mall depresses me no end”

You know why someone has the luxury to be sad because a photon of light wasn’t noticed, a scientist funded by capitalism.

[Carmel Hanes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting foray into the life of animals, teaching a lot about their senses and habits, and how we humans can misapply our own experiences in trying to understand theirs. Many fascinating tidbits of information, and an increased awareness of what I'm seeing as I watch the animals around me.

For example, who knew the sounds whales make can travel so incredibly far through the water; who knew that bats are one of the main predators of hummingbirds (don't you dare!); who knew that some birds see one thing with one eye (food source) and something else with the other (predators)--(the lazy eye in me thinks I might have been one of those birds in a former life). Fascinating research on unexpected things made me really glad that's not my line of work, but equally glad those who do it are willing to share. What must be tedious at times reveals incredible information.

A fun listen on audible and far too much to remember (I'm glad I don't have to pass a test), but it did raise my awareness in ways that will stay with me. For those interested in our animal neighbors, there's much to appreciate in this book.

[Cav · Rating 3 out of 5]

An Immense World was an interesting look into the topic, but the writing was not as engaging as I'd hoped it would be.

Author Edmund Soon-Weng Yong is a Malaysian-born British science journalist. He is a staff member at The Atlantic, which he joined in 2015. In 2021 he received a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ed Yong:


Yong opens the book with a good intro, where he drops this neat quote that speaks to the different manner in which all animals see the world:

"...These seven creatures share the same physical space but experience it in wildly and wondrously different ways. The same is true for the billions of other animal species on the planet and the countless individuals within those species.[*1] Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world..."

Central to Yong's writing here is the German term "Umwelt," explained in the quote below:

"THERE IS A wonderful word for this sensory bubble— Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic- German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world. Like the occupants of our imaginary room, a multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten. A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric acid that emanates from skin. These three things constitute its Umwelt. Trees of green, red roses too, skies of blue, and clouds of white—these are not part of its wonderful world.
The tick doesn’t willfully ignore them. It simply cannot sense them and doesn’t know they exist..."

The writing here covers many different creatures from the animal kingdom, and their unique sensory perceptions. Among the topics covered here by Yong includes:
• Olfaction in dogs and rats
• Pheromones in ants
• Snakes and their forked tongues
• Pain; across the animal kingdom
• Echolocation; Daniel Kish's clicking
• Living batteries; electric fields. Electric fish are talked about
• Magnetic Fields; birds, whales, sea turtles. Modern science's search for the elusive "magnetoreceptor"
• Octopus intelligence: "An octopus’s central nervous system contains around 500 million neurons—a total that dwarfs that of all other invertebrates and that’s comparable to the number found in small mammals.[*10] But only a third of these neurons are located in the animal’s head, within the central brain and the adjacent optic lobes that receive information from the eyes. The remaining 320 million are in the arms. Each arm “has a large and relatively complete nervous system, which seems barely to communicate with the other arms,” Robyn Crook once wrote. “ An octopus effectively has nine brains that have their own agendas.”
• Man's changing and reshaping the world; its impact on our natural world. Yong focuses on light and noise pollution in the book's outro

Unfortunately, and despite fielding some incredibly interesting subject material, I found much of the writing here to be somewhat long-winded and dry. Yong's prose had my attention wandering numerous times. The book is also quite long; the audio version I have clocks in at a bulky 14+ hours.

Possibly a subjective thing; I am very particular about how engaging the writing in a book is, and my reviews are always heavily weighted for this criterion. Sadly, that will see this one penalized a bit.


*******************

As mentioned; there was some really interesting info presented here. Unfortunately, Yong's overall presentation of this material fell a bit short for my tastes...
3.5 stars.

[Baal Of · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second book I've read by Yong and he is becoming one of my favorite popular science writers. The amount of information packed into this book is astonishing, but the organization and presentation is so engaging that it never feels overwhelming. The rich world of umwelten is being being explored in great depth, especially in the last few decades and it is astounding. Yong navigates the subject matter with a perfect blend of enthusiasm and scientific humilty. He covers how science has started to answer at least some questions such as the one discussed by Thomas Nagel in What Is It Like to Be a Bat? and he also makes clear that we can't ultimately know the answer because we do not have the senses to do so. Analogy can only get us so far.

A lesson that comes up repeatly is that the different sense are not "better" than others, rather they are differently adapted to different ways of surviving in different environments. Like many good science writers, Yong presents a deeply nuanced view of the subject, one which pushes against the simplistic, pat answers that many people prefer. I'll end with a small quote that happens to be quite apropos to me given a recent discussion I had with a creationist who popped out the tired old "what about eyes" argument:

different animal groups have repeatedly and independently evolved diverse eyes using the same opsin building blocks. The jellyfish alone have evolved stage-two eyes at least nine times, and stage-three eyes at least twice. Eyes, far from being a blow to evolutionary theory have proved to be one of its finest exemplars.

[carol.]

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Yong's writing a great deal. In fact, I probably should re-read his microbiome book, because it's just that good. But his longer pieces, and this book in particular, start to feel like a collection of factoids over a story.

The premise is that there are different types of senses that us humans, with our historically categorized five senses may be unaware of. This is a fascinating idea that most of us have probably bumped into at some time or another: bats and dolphins and echolocation; canines and their ability to hear the 'supersonic' dog-whistle; birds and bees and their ability to see into different color ranges and know if a flower or fruit is ripe and full of goodness; turtles, butterflies, and birds and their ability to steer across the planet using the electromagnetic field. You get the idea. He tries to weave this together, calling each sense an umwalt or world-view, and divides it into like chapters. The trouble is that at that point, it often devolves into a collection of anecdotes or facts. I found it fascinating, to be sure, but I'm a nature and biology geek. I also found it somewhat overwhelming, as it started to feel like reading a collection of Nature (a prominent science publication) abstracts. Yet, because I'm me, I really wanted to absorb and internalize much of his information. So it took a lot of time to get through.

It is also really sciencey in a way that needs a little more translation. He was able to do a better job of translation with his microbe book than this, and interestingly, I think Yong knows it too. {There's a section where the tone is definitely "stay with me here; I have to give you background physics.") Microbes are easily conceptualized as little animals, whereas understanding different senses has to get into the physics, neurobiology and--and this is a big one--the culture of how we process our world. That's heady stuff and I'm not sure this quite manages. There's a fascinating chapter on echolocation that starts off this chain of thought--the physics and the brain biology of processing--and then takes it a step further with talking about blind humans using echolocation. (I'm pretty sure there's a difference here that a biologist would call Yong out on, but I'm not the one to do so).

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A first-rate science book, about how animals perceive their worlds. Most much differently than we do!
I recommend starting with Jennifer Szalai's fine review at the NY Times, the best I saw online:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/22/bo...
A far better review than I could write!

I took very few notes, so my comments will be brief. I liked this book much more than Yong's debut, and I liked almost all of his scientific anecdotes. Good for fast-acting sense-of-wonder recharges! But I had trouble maintaining momentum, perhaps because of the sheer density of information that he retails. Yong is a good writer, he certainly did his homework -- but somehow his style rubs me the wrong way at times. I suspect because I don't much care for his politics, even though this book is almost politics-free. It speaks poorly of me that I would let this interfere with my reading enjoyment. Well, there it is: conservative guilt!

Kish the blind echolocator! He's learned to click like a bat, sort of, and can find his way around by clicking, listening for the echo, and a standard blind-man's cane. He and some of his blind pals even learned to mountain-bike, when he was younger and bolder, with clickers on the spokes of their rear wheels! Not an activity encouraged at his School for the Blind. It's a remarkable account, one of the best in the book.

I was trying to read the book pretty fast, knowing it wouldn't renew. I'm normally a fast reader, but not so much here. One minor annoyance is the many, many footnotes, in tiny type, some worthwhile, some trivial. I started skimming them as the book went on. And when I got tired of the book, I stopped & read something else. Overall, 4.4 stars, recommended reading. And only a hair below the book's current average score of 4.55 . . .

I picked some quotes which you can find at "see review," a feature that's just come back. The new review page is getting to be more acceptable as they fine-tune it.

[David Wineberg · Rating 5 out of 5]

A decade ago, Frans De Waal questioned Man’s misguided evaluations of animals, because they were always measured against Man’s own performance. Now, Ed Yong has put together just an overwhelming collection of stories and studies to describe the many senses animals employ that Man cannot even begin to experience. In An Immense World, Yong looks at how animals operate without the baselines of Man, for a trip to another planet, Earth, filled with strange beings people think they know, as well as endless ones they clearly don’t know at all. It promotes awe, wonder, and huge respect for even the simplest forms of life people take for granted or ignore.

What he found was that virtually everything in living beings is a tool. Everything has a purpose and an effect. Nothing is wasted. Navigating and communicating are the major uses, but far from the only things senses do.

Yong groups the stories by senses, 13 chapters of them, where tools/senses like echolocation, sonar, and magnetic and electric fields hold their own among sight, hearing, touch and taste. He finds experts – passionate scientists - who have devoted their lives to understanding a single kind of spider or owl, electric eel or parasitic wasp, in an absolutely endless variety of skills they employ to be as effective and competent as Man is in his world. All these animals are intensely sophisticated beings, and the more scientists study them, the more astounded they become. Man takes everything about animals at face value, when the exact opposite is needed – and merited. We haven’t even scratched the surface of how the world works.

There is a single word in An Immense World that jumps out at the reader, time and time again: unclear. lt is unclear how some unusual organs work, what data the animal receives, and how, or why they have this function when they also have that one. As much as we know, we will never get inside the head of another animal, because we would look at their lives with our minds and never theirs. And we will never appreciate how to employ their gifts as they do. We can never see what they see, smell what they smell, or sense what they sense, from a drop of water on a pond surface to an electron pushing away from another electron. It all remains unclear.

Yong gives the example of the octopus, with a total of nine large brains – one in each arm and a central brain that does not rule over the others. We cannot even conceive of what that is like. Yet the octopus is highly intelligent and lavishly talented. It can be curious, playful, determined, petulant and loving. It is a sentient being. It has also survived far longer than Man has or is likely to. In other words, scientists’ ignorance of how life works is not merely in its primitive stages today; we will never understand it completely. Let alone learn from it. In an endnote, Yong says of the octopus: (Philosopher Peter) “Godfrey-Smith marvelously compares the central brain to a conductor and the arms to jazz players, the latter ‘inclined to improvisation and accepting only so much direction.’” This animal deserves much appreciative study, and not ending up in a salad.

Man is all about vision, his favorite and most developed sense. So any being that doesn’t have the same vision as Man is looked down on. But Yong finds hundreds of different kinds of eyes, all with different abilities, pluses and minuses.

Ants see ultraviolet. This was discovered 150 years ago when a scientist held a prism over an ant colony. The light, now in its rainbow components, caused the ants to scramble away from the pure colors - even beyond the rainbow where the scientist saw nothing to cause them consternation. It was the ultraviolet range, that ants see and Man does not. It also transpires that sunflowers have “targets” of ultraviolet areas in their flowers, to attract birds that see UV. To Man, it is just a gray seed repository. There is a lot going on without our knowledge. Right in front of our eyes.

This visual prejudice is also harmful. Smooth surfaces and windows can be invisible to those using echolocation, for example, killing millions as they travel at night. Light pollution misdirects flying insects and newly hatched turtles. Manmade undersea noises prevent communication by all kinds of wildlife that turn out to be enormously chatty. Even just yanking the dog away from the telephone pole is cruel treatment for a being whose favorite thing in the world is strewn garbage. Yong’s achievement is to take animal senses for what they really are, and not how weak they might be in parking lot lighting of bluish white or fluorescent orange.

Meanwhile, vision itself comes in astonishing varieties. Some vision is restricted to just a few degrees – but is razor sharp there. Some vision only counts looming objects and does not paint the entire picture. Different parts of eyes provide different kinds of visual data. Some animals have innumerable eyes all over their bodies, all providing data. Others have no use for eyes at all. There are animals with flicker rates so high that Man’s vision would be like looking at slides to them. For Man, the rate is 60 Hz (cycles per second), but many dragonflies, bees and flies see at 350. Some nocturnal toads see at less than .025. They all survey the same scene much differently than people do.

As for color, it depends on the cones in the eye. Two will provides tens of thousands of colors, mostly grays, yellows and blues. Dogs are in this category. Three, like Man’s, add greens and reds, multiplying that to several million shades. Four – tens of millions of colors. Trichromatic mammals see more kinds of colorful fruits, that dichromats miss completely in tests. The dichromats however, are far better at finding insects among leaves and branches because of their intense exploitation of the grayscale.

Birds are mostly tetrachromatic, able to pinpoint shades of color that humans miss entirely. Yong says to think of Man’s color chart as a flat triangle, and birds’ color range as a pyramid. Birds see other birds very differently as a result. White would not simply be white. Ultraviolets could change the appearance of many feathers. Their identification of another bird is completely different from ours. Man is so lackadaisical he named a redbreasted ground scavenger a robin, when its namesake back in Europe is a flycatcher. A moth would notice the difference instantly.

Hairs turn out to be the most versatile tool in the box. Hairs are the key to hearing in humans (and most others). They also detect the presence of other animals, the gentlest ripples of water, or the breeze created by a moving spider. Fish leave an underwater stream by swimming along that all kinds of underwater animals can detect. Such as seals – who hunt them. Meanwhile, the flowing stream itself provides all kinds of data to the fish in it, all through those hairs.

But it doesn’t stop there. Hairs pick up data from the magnetic field around the Earth, from the north-south orientation in the midsection to the doughnut holes at the poles. They measure electrical charges to identify individual kinds of insects within range, acting as a replacement for touch itself. Just because an animal has no fingers does not mean it has any less a sense of touch. Same goes for dolphins under water.

Sounds differ according to the listener. Scientists divided up the song of the zebra finch according to constantly repeated segments. When they mixed up the segments, it made no difference to the birds. Zebra finches listen for nuances in the individual notes. Any variance will be noticed and cause concern, but the song itself is immaterial. Humans can tell the difference in the segments, but not the notes.

This makes the point – one of many times throughout the book – that humans simply don’t know what is going on in the world around them.

An Immense World is another of those great books where you night as well leave the Hiliter in the drawer, because every page would be totally soaked in yellow, and you’d never find anything standing out. Plus, the range is nothing short of phenomenal. Here’s a sampling of what I mean:


-Some 200,000 kinds of insect communicate through surface vibration. They cause plant shoots and branches to vibrate with their messages. By staying still and not actually moving to meet other insects, they avoid predators. Insect songs can be melodic, well beyond chirping or buzzing.
-Elephants feel ground vibrations in their ultra-sensitive toenails, and can tell the difference between family and strangers as well as other species, even miles away.
-Spiders do not wait around for a gust of wind; they levitate using the laws of physics, ie. same charges repel each other. “Spider silk picks up a negative charge as it leaves the spider’s body, and is repelled by the negative charge of the plants on which they sit.” So even on a windless day, spiders can travel for miles. It’s called ballooning.
-We calculate distance by merging the sight from two eyes. The mantis shrimp does the same with three zones in one eye, giving it depth perception in each independent eye.
-An owl’s whole face is an ear. Facial feathers focus sounds, and as one earhole is higher on the head than the other, precise location, to the millimeter, even in total darkness, is not a problem for them.
-Fish have a lateral line of sensors along their bodies that tell them the direction and speed of the current, and the presence of other animals. The catfish’s entire body is covered not with scales but with touch sensors. They have a “feel” for their entire surroundings.
-Thanks to their heightened sense of touch, even blind fish can school.
-Mosquitos do not target perfumes or body heat, they are totally focused on carbon dioxide emissions from warmbodied mammals – a total giveaway that a free meal is available.
-350 kinds of fish produce electricity. They use it as their sense of touch, with special hairs on their bodies to read the data and build up a map or picture of their surroundings. They retain this picture and can return precisely to the spot, even years later. And some can kill with this electricity – up to 860 volts.
-A peacock’s magnificent tail disturbs the air at a specific frequency when he fans it, causing nearby peahens to feel it resonate in their feathered crowns. Then females acknowledge by displaying back to the male. It’s a two-way conversation.
-Hibernation is not sleep. Squirrels have to rouse themselves from hibernation, raise their body temperatures and pulse so they can get some real sleep – or be exhausted from the lack of it.
-Alligators can feel a single drop of water on a pond surface, locate it precisely, and whip around to snag whatever made it, all in a fraction of a second. That’s why they lounge near the shore all day.
-Snakes do the same, using their constantly flicking tongues as noses. Same microsecond response. Not being warmblooded and needing to eat daily, rattlesnakes can sit coiled and immobile for days, waiting.
-All living beings create electricity in water. Which is why animals like many sharks have electroreceptors right by their mouths, so they can dig for buried living treasure that fairly screams at them.
-Vision can have high resolution or high sensitivity – but not both at the same time. They tend to be mutually exclusive.
-Sound can have high temporal resolution or high pitch sensitivity – but not both at the same time. Some birds can switch between at will.
-Hummingbirds will open their beaks for no apparent reason, but actually, they are singing at pitches above 30,000 Hz – well above the 20K maximum humans can hear. Man has never heard a hummingbird song. Just the occasional squeak.

There is some degree of redemption for humans in the book. Yong visits Daniel Kish, who lost both his eyes to cancer as a baby. He soon started making loud clicks – his own sonar – and 50 years later gets by fine with them and a long cane. He can tell when a car is parked on grass. That’s how sensitive his personal sonar is. He can recognize homes by the porches and shrubbery out front. And even when a branch is going to block his way. He will duck out of the way without missing a beat. It is human echolocation, like a bat’s.

Meanwhile, scientists have the chore of naming all their test animals, and sometimes they get creative about it. The hands-down winner in this book is a manatee named Hugh. Second prize goes to Turtelini.

There is something for everyone to be amazed at in this book. It is as entertaining as it is world-shaking. The stories come at the reader fast and furiously and continuously. And readers will come to appreciate that this is only a beginning.

David Wineberg

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[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm a sucker for great science writing for a general audience, and this book certainly fit the bill. Definitely recommended for anyone who was ever curious about how other animal species experience the world and the myriad sensations and aspects of our reality we are more or less oblivious to as the unrestrained universe cavorts around us.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the right audience this is a wonderful book. (For me a YA version would have been perfect.) The author writes very well and has a joyfully inquisitive style that's illuminating and thought provoking. He succeeds in opening the reader's mind about the way other living beings sense the world around us. I don't want to mention the specifics for fear of spoiling the surprises but I was fascinated by many of the revelations.

The problem I had was the author seemed to take the "more is more" approach and piled on too much information for my interest and my ability to keep up. I was left wondering, What DIDN'T make it into the book? Included in many paragraphs are footnotes which contain even more information. 20 to 30 footnotes per chapter, none containing citations, all with additional asides. In the kindle version there are hyperlinks that connect you to the particular footnote. Some paragraphs had two or three footnotes which made it a chore to read. Here's a sample:

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"Each sucker ganglion connects to another cluster of neurons in the center of the arm called the brachial ganglion. All the brachial ganglia are then connected in a long row running down the arm: Think of them as a string of fairy lights, and the sucker ganglia as their bulbs. The sucker ganglia don’t communicate with each other, but the brachial ganglia do.[*11] They coordinate the individual suckers and allow the entire arm to act in an organized way. And they can also accomplish a lot on their own, without involving the central brain. The arm contains all the circuitry it needs to reach out, grab objects, and pull them back in. For example, neurobiologist Binyamin Hochner found that when the arm touches an object, two waves of neural signals travel down its length, one from the contact point and one from the base. Where these waves meet, the arm forms a temporary elbow,
bending to draw the object toward the octopus’s mouth. “There’s so much information and behavior that’s stored in the arms,” Grasso tells me.[*12]"
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*11 Between them, each sucker ganglion and its corresponding brachial ganglion contain around 10,000 neurons. That’s roughly as many as in an entire leech or sea slug. A single octopus arm contains roughly as many neurons as a lobster.
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*12 In the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Wells removed large parts of the brain from some octopuses and showed that these “decerebrate” animals could still use their suckers to manipulate objects, open clamshells, and feed.

The book wore me out but ended strongly. The final chapter addressed the problems of light and noise pollution and their negative impacts on nonhumans. Yong's generalist approach here was a distinct strength and a welcome departure from the earlier chapters. The information was simple, straightforward and impactful:

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"In most cases, instead of adding stimuli that we have removed, we can simply remove those that we added—a luxury that doesn’t apply to most pollutants. Radioactive waste can take millennia to degrade. Persistent chemicals like the pesticide DDT can thread their way through the bodies of animals long after they are banned. Plastics will continue to despoil the oceans for centuries even if all plastic production halts tomorrow. But light pollution ceases as soon as lights are turned off. Noise pollution abates once engines and propellers wind down. Sensory pollution is an ecological gimme—a rare example of a planetary problem that can be immediately and effectively addressed."