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

by Ed Yong

If you lick one of them, you’ll both simultaneously taste each other.[*32] “If I were a catfish, I’d love to jump into a vat of chocolate,” John Caprio tells me. “You could taste it with your butt.”

In a way, we see by smelling light.

brighter and brighter,” Morehouse tells me. For a jumping spider, getting older “is like watching the sun rising.”

A mallard duck’s visual field is completely panoramic, with no blind spot either above or behind it. When sitting on the surface of a lake, a mallard can see the entire sky without moving. When flying, it sees the world simultaneously moving toward it and away from it.

“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,” vision scientist Sonke Johnsen once wrote.