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

 

Summary (from the publisher): Enter a new dimension - the world as it is truly perceived by other animals.

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 only a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into previously unfathomable dimensions - 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 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.

Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the threads 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.

Review: This fascinating non-fiction work explores the way animals perceive the world. Chapter by chapter, author Ed Yong takes us through the vastly different ways that different members of the animal kingdom use their senses to navigate through the world including smell, sight, colors, pain, hot and cold, touch, magnetism, and more. 

This book was fascinating. Yong talks about each animal's individual umwelt, or its own individual perception of the world through its particular sense mechanisms. This was an interesting way of capturing in a succinct word the reality that each animal has a wholly different experience of the world thanks to thousands of years of adaptation that have led to highly specialized and very different senses for different animals. 

I was particularly struck by the chapter on smell. Apparently, humans actually have a much better sense of smell than the stereotype suggests, which was based on early and faulty research. Likewise, for decades, scientists assumed birds couldn't smell, solely based on early research that was wholly wrong. I also was blown away to learn that many animals can see ultraviolet colors! And in fact, many birds that we perceive as just white or that to the human eye male and females look alike are in fact colored totally differently; our eyes just aren't capable of distinguishing the differences! Indeed, there is a vast range in the colors that different animals can see and distinguish. 

I listened to the audiobook version of this, which was read by the author and was very well done. Although I did enjoy it, in some ways I regret not reading a print copy so that I could highlight all the many fascinating tidbits and facts scattered on literally every page! This is chock full of interesting asides and random examples from throughout the animal kingdom. 

Stars: 4