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I'm always in the market for books and essays that explain how diverse nonhuman animals (animals) live in our world and in their own. I recently read an outstanding and highly readable book by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong called An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us and it's now sitting on the top of an ever-growing pyramid of books on the floor of my office simply because it is that good. It would be a perfect summer read while numerous people and other animals are out and about doing their thing.1
I can't possibly cover but a fraction of the interesting nonhuman beings about whom Yong writes, so here are a few examples. He writes about dogs (their amazing noses, of course), cats, various birds, and other animals with whom many people are rather familiar. He also tells us about the amazing sensory worlds of beetles and other bugs who many people find disgusting, along with turtles, bats, scallops, octopuses (who have brains in their arms), spiders (who think with their webs), crocodiles whose "scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertip," and much more.
By learning about the sensory worlds of other animals we can also learn about our own senses, an important message in Jackie Higgins' fascinating book, Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses. In an interview with Higgins, she noted that the platypus teaches us that what we think of as reality is only a reflection of what our senses detect and that that is a shockingly small fraction of surrounding reality.
As Yong also stresses, our own senses are very limited. They allow us to live our lives but don't come close to telling us what is really out there. We see only a ten trillionth of the electromagnetic spectrum. Imagine extending our range to perceive infrared heat, like vampire bats, or ultraviolet light, like birds. Can we truly imagine experiencing the taste of a catfish, the touch of a star-nosed mole, or the balance of a cheetah?
Higgins writes, "Ultimately, the natural world might inspire a brave new world of human sentience."
Among Yong's numerous important messages not only about the sensory lives of numerous animals, many of which people write off as being simple or mechanistic, uninteresting, and unsophisticated, he highlights how learning about other animals can also help us learn about the fascinating and often hidden world in which we're immersed daily and about how human activities that seem harmless can hijack the lives of these animals by introducing what he calls "sensory pollution."
Yong aptly writes, "Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection." It disconnects members of the same and different species who are trying to communicate with one another and also us from them. How can we learn about, appreciate, and respect the lives of other animals when we don't allow them to live the natural lives they're supposed to live because of the ways in which natural selection—evolution—shaped them. Yong's last chapter, "Save the Quiet, Preserve the Dark: Threatened Sensescapes" is a gem.
If you're looking for a great summer read about the lives of other animals, Yong's book is as good a choice as any, and if you have the time, also read Higgins' book about the phenomenal senses of other animals.
This past week, while cycling back in Boulder, I saw a class of youngsters on a dirt bike path. I stopped to ask them what they were doing and a 6-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy exuberantly explained to me that they were "studying different insects and how they know how to get home." Their teacher, an awesome and very patient woman, told me about their nature class and how it always went way over in time because the kids had so many questions, and equally or more importantly, they came to realize how careful we must be when we tread into the lives of other animals. I told her about Yong's and Higgins' books and she said she would read them as soon as she could and share the information with the kids.
As I was riding away one of the students yelled, "We don't touch the insects, we just watch them because they're so cool." I bet this would make Yong and Higgins very happy.
References
1) Part of the book's description reads: The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses to encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats. 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, 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 that remain unsolved.
Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Senses.
It’s Time To Stop Wondering if Animals Are Sentient—They Are.
