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

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Rating: 5/5 Stars

An impressive book, full of wonderful facts and some grounded speculations looking at how various creatures sense, and make sense, of the world around them. Ed Yong (the author) reminds us that trying to understand the behaviour of creatures based on what we can sense can be futile. And by forcing creatures into a human centric world (near constant lighting at night, urban noise, artificial chemicals in the environment), we may be altering their behaviour and damaging the natural biodiversity.

Ed Yong starts by introducing the reader to the term, Umwelt (as used by biologist Jakob von Uexkül) to represent each creature’s unique perception of the world. He then shows us the Umwelts of various creatures as experienced through the various senses: smell, taste, light, colour, the sensation of pain and heat, contact, vibrations and sound. He then covers three of the more mysterious senses; echolocation and the ability to sense electric and magnetic fields. Each sense is shown by giving examples of various creatures whose ability to use the sense differs and/or exceeds our abilities to use them.

He then closes the book by showing how animals draw upon the various senses to form each creature’s Umwelt, and how we are altering what creatures are sensing from their surroundings by ‘polluting’ the environment with our lights, noise and artificial chemicals.

Throughout the book, Ed Yong features the research and work being done by numerous researchers to understand how creatures sense the world and, possibly, how they make sense of the world using the information provided by the senses.

It may be impossible to fully imagine how even familiar creatures like dogs sense the world compared to us, much less creatures like spiders, birds, fishes, electric eels, moles or elephants (all examples from the book). But Ed Yong gives it a good try, and by the end, you’ll probably appreciate the fact that we may never share the Umwelt of other creatures, but you’ll be aware that they see the world differently from us and that needs to be accounted for when trying to understand why they behave in certain ways that may seem puzzling to us, limited as we are by our own Umwelts.

Book read from 2022/08/27 to 2022/09/09