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

A grand tour through the hidden world of animal senses that will transform the way you perceive the world--from a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. 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 planet's biggest eyes 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 colours 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. In An Immense World, author and famed science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to begin to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism and pulses of pressure that surround us. Because in order to understand our world, we have not to travel to other places, but to see through other eyes.