My Christmas gift to you is a book I’ve just finished reading. It is the best book I’ve read in years and one of the best books I’ve ever read, and I read a lot of books. The book is An Immense World, subtitled How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. What makes this such a great book?
First, the writer, Ed Yong, has style as good as any novelist, even though he is writing non-fiction work. It is almost lyrical while also seeming like a conversation with your best friend. Your best friend who is way smarter than you but talks to you on your level. And has a sense of humor. Every page inspires a sense of wonder. This is his second book. The first, I Contain Multitudes, which I haven’t read but now I must. Yong is also the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles he wrote about Covid-19.
The second thing that makes this a great book is a compelling subject. In this case, Yong tackles the topic of animal senses. We’ve all heard that eagles see better than we do, and dogs smell better than we do, but this isn’t necessarily true, plus the topic is so much more complex. Vision and smell aren’t simply senses that a species has more or less of. There are different types of vision. Many, many types of vision. And a dog’s sense of smell is better than ours, but the nature of it is different from ours too.
And then there are senses that some animals have but that humans don’t. It has been asked, what is it like to be a bat? Bats can see, despite the expression ‘blind as a bat,’ but they primarily navigate via echolocation, which of course, is a sense people don’t have. But even that is wrong. It turns out that many blind people use echolocation, and there is even a group that teaches people how to echolocate. Blind people who become good at this learned skill, can do things like mountain biking.
Taking vision further, there are many animals that can see in the ultraviolet spectrum. Some see colors that we can’t. But what do those colors look like?
There are at least four types of eyes, and they show up in the darndest places. A sea scallop has then lining its lips. Some insects have eyes at the end of their antennae, which makes sense. The Japanese yellow swallowtail butterfly has photoreceptors, a type of eye, on their genitals. Which is sure to bring out the 12-year-old boy that lurks inside every man. And from here, the jokes pretty much write themselves:
“Hey, baby, I’ve got my eye on you!”
“Whoa, it’s dark in here.”
I’m here all week.
Whales know where the hook is inside a caught tuna and will strip the flesh without biting the part with the hook. Dolphin sonar is superior to anything the Navy has. Dolphins are like swimming MRI machines.
Some pinnipeds have whiskers so sensitive that they can detect a minnow swimming from 200 meters away. Not by smell, but by detecting the turbulence in the water left in the minnow’s path.
Earth is full of sights, sounds, textures, vibrations, smells, tastes, electric fields, and magnetic fields. But each animal, including humans, can only detect a small fraction of the reality’s fullness, perceiving a tiny bit of our immense world.
This sensory bubble was termed Umwelt, a term invented by Jakob von Uexküll, a German zoologist, in 1909. Welt is world in German and Umwelt is the word for environment. Umwelt isn’t just what surrounds a creature, it is what the animal can sense and experience. It is the animal’s perceptual world. This concept of Umwelt is central to this book, as so many of the amazing senses of animals are things that we can barely conceive. Uexküll compared an animal’s body to a house. Every house has a number of windows. But only some of these windows open and how they open differs.
Humans try to divide senses into discrete concepts, such as vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell. These are the five senses that have been traditionally recognized. But there are others that we have and others that animals have but we don’t. And there is evidence that animals combine certain senses in ways we cannot. Such as touch and taste as one integrated sense.
At this point, you can probably ‘sense’ that this isn’t a simple read like a trashy novel. But then, you wouldn’t expect me to read a trashy novel, would you? And I wouldn’t expect that from you either. This book is about science, and it will cause you to think. But the writing style makes it almost effortless. Plus, on virtually every page, this book will provoke a sense (that word again) of wonder in our natural world. It is astonishing.
Get yourself a copy of this book, get an audiobook, load it on your Kindle or borrow it from the library, but read this book. This gets my highest recommendation.
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