David’s Reviews > An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us > Status Update

Magnetoreception is a tough nut, at least partly because you need good (expensive) equipment to figure out if the fields are what you think, and then you have to see how animals react. It's just tougher than work on human touch or even electrical fields.

Electrical animals have surprising abilities, and more animals use electricity to sense their surroundings than I imagined (including honeybees! ).

Echolocation is a crazy sense for bats, dolphins & whales, and even for people! Especially loved the story of the whale that could sense that two metal tubes requisitioned to be identical were actually very slightly different (by 0.6 mm).

Just read about animals that detect waves through the ground or other medium, eg spiders using a web.

Appreciate the view of a scientist who'd studied pain in crustaceans for 15 years who said the answer so far to whether they feel pain is "maybe." It's hard to say what animals experience in their brains when we have to judge by their reactions and behaviors.

Time to be fascinated by color vision.

Now reading the actual book rather than estimating progress based on the sample.

Already lots of amazing stuff about some animals' sense of smell (dogs of course, but birds? Elephants? Snakes?) and then info about how animals see (eg starfish have eyes at the end of each arm; hopping spiders have 4 sets of eyes, but only the side/back ones can track motion).