“An Immense World” by Ed Yong

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

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


We know that many animals can sense and perceive the world in different ways than humans do, but it’s hard to imagine it, really, when we are used to rely on our own perception of the world.

“Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.”

Yong presents his discussion of animal perception through the concept of Umwelt: “Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world.” And it’s fascinating trying to think of the Umwelt of those who sense the world — trapped in my own Umwelt, I almost wrote see the world — though echolocation and electric and magnetic fields.

“The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.”

Did you know that zebra stripes have zero to do with camouflage, lions would be considered legally blind in the human world (and they can’t see these zebra stripes from hunting distance at hunting times) and scallops have many beautiful eyes which function as a version of security camera system? Did you know dolphins are basically living CT scanners? Did you realize how much we describe the world through visual metaphors? Or how many of our ideas of animals are based on our inability to perceive when they are communicating or engaging with their world because they are using senses or sensory ranges that are not within our own Umwelt?

“The first step to understanding another animal’s Umwelt is to understand what it uses its senses for.”

Ed Yong is a great narrator, able to present dense information in accessible, interesting and fun way. He makes the concepts understandable without oversimplifying. He hits my funny buttons all the time, and I love it — I mean, staying dead serious for several hundreds of nonfiction pages is not in my Umwelt.

“They punch their prey into submission. They punch anything that intrudes upon their burrows. They punch each other at first contact. Mantis shrimps throw punches like humans throw opinions—frequently, aggressively, and without provocation.
[…]
Imagine that you’re a mantis shrimp. It is a truth universally acknowledged that you are in want of something to punch.”

But then in the end of the book Yong brings in sobering seriousness. With humans not being able to perceive things other Earth inhabitants do it’s scarily easy for us to completely mess up other creatures’ day to day existence and survival even when we actually don’t mean to. All the extra light and sound that comes as a byproduct of our overpopulated overcrowded existence is extremely disruptive, but unless you think of it from the perspective of others’ Umwelten it may be hard to realize or remedy.

Wonderfully informative, well-presented and fascinating book. Easy 5 stars.

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Buddy read with Allie, Anna and Carol

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