If you were to write such a book, which of the senses would you lead off with? (n.b.: there are way more than five.) Despite our strong visual bias, and because we are but "leaking sacks of chemicals" and he is mostly discussing animals, Yong starts with smell and taste. "To get an idea of the shape of, imagine placing a miniature trampoline on the bottom of a goldfish bowl and turning the whole thing on its side." Pretty clear, right? (Now imagine a couple of those just behind your nostrils.) He then tells us how the arrangement works. Yong excels in placing things in contexts that readers can appreciate, and despite the challenges of describing all sorts of animal activities and anatomical parts that are beyond our ken, he's great at elucidating the unfamiliar. Unlike a few other sciencey titles I've browsed, this is no mere compendium of lists. His subtitle, "How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us," only hints at the scope of the book. You've no doubt seen articles on how the noises of city life are making birds sing louder, or how artificial lighting adversely affects their migration. If you've read A Kansas Bestiary, you know that boreal chorus frogs hear through their front legs and regal fritillary butterflies smell with their feet. If you've read James Nestor's book Deep, you know about the sperm whale clicks that travel thousands of miles. If you're a birder, you may have heard that kestrels can see the urine trails of the voles they prey on using ultraviolet-light vision. There's lots of this sort of quirky information out there. (I can't believe he missed it, but Wikipedia tells me that some treehoppers, bugs that look like thorns, even communicate with geckos this way.) Lucky for us, there are smart voices to direct our attention and help translate.Įd Yong, more writer than biologist, hooked me when he described in the introduction to An Immense World how treehopper vibrations sound like cows mooing. We might even care a bit more about little things like biodiversity and extinction. There's so much fascinating activity going on around us, we'd all walk around slack-jawed if we could witness it. The "immense world" concept is something I was aiming for when drafting the abandoned plants-and-fungi post.
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