An immense world : how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us
Edition
First edition.
Publication Information
New York : Random House, [2022]
Physical Description
x, 449 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color), charts ; 25 cm
Summary
"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 but a tiny sliver of an immense world. This book welcomes us into a previously unfathomable dimension--the world as it is truly perceived by other animals. We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires (and fireworks), songbirds that can see the Earth's magnetic fields, and brainless jellyfish that nonetheless have complex eyes. We discover that a crocodile's scaly face is as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, and that even fingernail-sized spiders can make out the craters of the moon. We meet people with unusual senses, from women who can make out extra colors to blind individuals who can navigate using reflected echoes like bats. Yong tells the stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, and also looks ahead at the many mysteries which lie unsolved"--
Contents
- The only true voyage
- Leaking sacks of chemicals : smells and tastes
- Endless ways of seeing : light
- Rurple, grurple, yurple : color
- The unwanted sense : pain
- So cool : heat
- A rough sense : contact and flow
- The rippling ground : surface vibrations
- All ears : sound
- A silent world shouts back : echoes
- Living batteries : electric fields
- They know the way : magnetic fields
- Every window at once : uniting the senses
- Save the quiet, preserve the dark : threatened sensescapes.