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

"Well, there’s nothing wrong with being a killjoy. But the truth is a combination of the two—the farcical and the serious. Because when we thinking about human interactions with animals, they often range from the comic to the tragic. In laboratories, for example, there is a clear imbalance of power—that’s the tragic dimension. But it’s not as if we see a complete obliteration of the agency of other animals. I think animals are inventive enough to find ways to wiggle their way out of human control in certain cases, even if only for a moment. And those are moments of semi-comic relief. Think of all the reports of animals escaping from the lab or the zoo, while humans look for them frantically. There is a comic quality to these escapes, but a comic quality that occurs within a larger tragic setting: the tragedy of captivity. But, yes, there is the heavy element, and there are moments of levity, and I think every animal expert—whether they are scientific researchers, philosophers or anthropologists—is familiar with this duality. Ed Yong is a wonderful writer. He’s given us a very erudite and engaging book. There is just so much information in it about the sensory systems of other species and the radical diversity of modes of being that exist in nature. This book is ultimately about the senses. For a long time, we’ve thought that there are only five senses—largely because we universalise from a very narrow slice of the world, which is the slice of human experience. So we equate the five dominant human senses with ‘the senses’ more generally. But of course, there are many other senses beyond those five, as well as senses that only other species have and for which we don’t have a human version. Ed Yong wants us to attend to those other senses. That’s why the imagination, for him, is such an important methodological principle. It is through the imagination that we access the central philosophical concept he uses in the book, which is the concept of the ‘Umwelt’, a German term that just means ‘the lived world,’ the world as it is experienced by a particular organism. It comes from the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, who describes the world of a particular animal as an circuit between the animal’s ‘receptor system’ (everything that the animal can sense and register from the external world—Do they see? Do they smell? Do they have sonar?) and the ‘effector system’ (all the things that the animal can do with that information—Can they fly? Can they spot a predator? Can they build a nest?). These two systems create the bubble that is the animal’s lived world. “For a long time, we’ve thought that there are only five senses—largely because we universalise from a very narrow slice of the world” Ed Yong makes two really interesting arguments that are already there in Uexküll, but I think Yong explains them clearly. One is that the Umwelt of every animal is unique, based on species membership and maybe even varying from animal to animal. The other is that animals can’t step out of their Umwelt. We cannot stop seeing the world through a human lens any more than a wolf can step outside of his or her canine perception of the world. But how then can we, humans, think about the worlds of other animals when we cannot step out of our own? I think Yong believes that we can enter the bubble of another animal to some extent. At the very least, we can notice what other bubbles are out there, what possible shapes they might have, what possible colours they might display. The book taps into the element of wonder, examining these hidden realms that are perhaps not hidden at all. They may be right next to us."

"Yes. An Immense World is an immense book that really tackles big ideas. It starts off with this idea of the umwelt , basically our sensory bubble. For example, human vision only covers light between one frequency and another. We can’t see ultraviolet, we can’t see infrared, but a lot of other animals can. Some animals will have a bigger umwelt, and still others will have smaller umwelt focused only on what they need to know. Like those treehoppers: all they hear is other treehoppers. They only listen to that specific frequency. And some moths can only smell female moths, and nothing else. That’s all they need. It’s a bit like how some insects can’t eat in their adult form. They only need to live long enough to find their mate, so that’s what they do with laser focus. There are other senses too that we don’t have. Like some animals are able to sense electromagnetic fields. That’s how they can migrate long distances. It’s why hammerhead sharks have that hammerhead, it’s a bit like a metal detector. They think, ‘oh, there’s a flounder’, and they eat the flounder. It makes you appreciate that we are very limited. We sometimes see animals as being lower down on the evolutionary tree, but the reality is that animals have evolved to the exact state that they need. That might be being able to see and hear only a very small number of things is enough so that they can propagate their species. The reason that we thought this book was special was that some of these concepts would be really tough to understand without the book. For example, electromagnetic waves, or how sound is propagated; he gets you to learn some basic physics of how these things work. I think that’s important. It’s a challenging topic, because the physics can be sort of abstract, but he brings in examples of animals that can do all these tasks. It’s also funny and personal—there’s a hilarious bit about manatees doing “oripulation” using their face and whiskers to explore his hand intimately, and he felt like he was being harassed. Another positive feature is that much of the science covered is very recent. I’m a professional scientist but a good portion of this book was about topics I didn’t know about because they are being researched right now. The book is a huge accomplishment but he’s also very humble about his role in it."

"This was a book I was very excited about when I first saw it. I thought, ‘I must read this!’ It really is an absolutely marvelous read, from start to finish. It’s just very intriguing. It focuses on animal senses—including smell, sight, hearing, and echolocation, among others. It’s written in a way that truly defines what a great science book is, in that it takes a topic and describes it in a clear scientific manner, but also in a way that really makes the reader think. It really makes you think about all the different senses and all these animals with their amazing senses all around us. The book opens up the reader to a whole new world. As humans, we use sight as our main sense to interpret the world around us. But for dogs, for example, their main sense is smell. Learning how a dog, and all the other animals discussed in the book, interpret the world around them was truly intriguing. I also learned about animals that I’d never heard about before. I learned about the star-nosed mole and the fire-chaser beetle, which is really quite amazing. Fire-chaser beetles sense forest fires from miles away and go there to lay their eggs. I really went ‘Wow!’ learning about that. After finishing the book, I felt I had a new appreciation for the world around me and all the species of animals that inhabit it. It really made me think and understand that we are not the only ones here. It’s quite special."