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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.
an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world.
Our Umwelt is still limited; it just doesn’t feel that way. To us, it feels all-encompassing. It is all that we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know. This is an illusion, and one that every animal shares.
The senses transform the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences—things we can react to and act upon. They allow biology to tame physics. They turn stimuli into information. They pull relevance from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany. They connect animals to their surroundings. And they connect animals to each other via expressions, displays, gestures, calls, and currents.
Nothing can sense everything, and nothing needs to. That is why Umwelten exist at all. It is also why the act of contemplating the Umwelt of another creature is so deeply human and so utterly profound. Our senses filter in what we need. We must choose to learn about the rest.
Giant whales have a volleyball-sized sensor at the tip of their lower jaw, which was only discovered in 2012 and whose function is still unclear.
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.
A dog can sniff six times a second,
I watch the spider, and it watches me back, two starkly different species connected by our dominant sense.
The rise of high-resolution vision might explain why, around 541 million years ago, the animal kingdom dramatically diversified, giving rise to the major groups that exist today. This flurry of evolutionary innovation is called the Cambrian explosion, and stage-four eyes might have been one of the sparks that ignited it.
A cow can simultaneously see a farmer approaching it from the front, a collie walking up from behind, and the herdmates at its side. Looking around, which is inextricable from our experience of vision, is actually an unusual activity, which animals do only when they have restricted visual fields and narrow acute zones.
