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

by Ed Yong

Lobster eyes have inspired space telescopes, the ears of a parasitic fly have influenced hearing aids, and military sonar has been honed by work on dolphin sonar.

Why study this

“They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Wwhat are animals

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.

Biology taming physics

They pull relevance from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany.

Note for analytical writeup

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.

Example of what sets humans apart?

A scientist’s explanations about other animals are dictated by the data she collects, which are influenced by the questions she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by her senses. The boundaries of the human Umwelt often make the Umwelten of others opaque to us.

Bias in this field

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. It reminds us that there is light in darkness, noise in silence, richness in nothingness. It hints at flickers of the unfamiliar in the familiar, of the extraordinary in the everyday, of magnificence in mundanity. It shows us that clipping a microphone onto a plant can be an intrepid act of exploration. Stepping between Umwelten, or at least trying to, is like setting foot upon an alien planet. Uexküll even billed his work as a “travelogue.”

All is not what it seems.

The Seabird’s Cry,

Book suggestion

In a way, we see by smelling light.

We see by smelling light?

The Optics of Life

Book review

if we designed racecourses for inclusive human vision, we’d probably do the same. Most “color-blind” people are also dichromats, because they’re missing one of the three usual cones. They still see colors, albeit in a narrower range.

Inclusive designs

Mantis shrimps throw punches like humans throw opinions—frequently, aggressively, and without provocation.

Funny

Nociception is the sensory process by which we detect damage. Pain is the suffering that ensues.

Scientific term for detecting vs suffering from pain

Imagine that, right now, a sea otter is about to search for food. Floating on its back on the surface of the sea, it rolls and dives. It will only stay submerged for a minute—roughly the time it will take you to read this paragraph.9 The descent eats up many of the precious seconds, so once the otter reaches the right depth, it has no time for indecisiveness. In a few frantic moments, it presses its knobby mittens over the seafloor, inspecting whatever it can find. The water is dark, but darkness doesn’t matter. To some of the most sensitive paws in the world, the ocean is bright with shapes and textures to be felt, grasped, pressed, prodded, squeezed, stroked, and manhandled—or perhaps otterhandled. Hard-shelled prey nestle among the similar hard rocks, but in a split second, the otter feels the difference between the two, and pulls the former from the latter. With its sense of touch, its dexterous paws, and its overabundant mustelid confidence, it snatches that clam, yanks that abalone, grabs that sea urchin, and finally ascends to eat its catches, breaking the water at the end of this sentence.

Good writing. Almost like music

We only have a rough sense of the sense that senses roughness.

Pun

catch food; instead, it sits in wait for its prey. Its legs are covered

The songs are haunting, mesmerizing, and surprising. None of them sound remotely like the familiar, high-pitched chirping of crickets or cicadas, but instead sound more like birds, apes, or even machinery and musical instruments. They’re often deep and melodic, and they likely sound that way to the insects themselves.

Possibly what the insect heArs

membrane and connected to a nerve cell. When a surface wave reaches

Courting males might call 5,000 times in a single evening before they’re chosen. Ryan knows this because he spent 186 consecutive nights at Barro Colorado, recording the serenades and escapades of a thousand individually marked túngara frogs from dusk to dawn.35 It was a marathon of voyeurism, from which he learned one crucial fact: Chucks are very sexy.

Studying courting frogs

Silent Thunder.

Book recommendation

seen that, but when you look at them, you can tell they’re not

gather stimuli from an animal’s surroundings, and, since most stimuli are distorted by the tissues of an animal’s body, sense organs are almost always exposed directly to the

scientists discovered that some bacteria turn themselves into living compass needles by growing chains of magnetite crystals inside their cells.

Bacterial magnetite