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Ed Yong Books

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“We normalize the abnormal, and accept the unacceptable. Remember that more than 80 percent of people live under light polluted skies, and two-thirds of Europeans are immersed in noise equivalent to constant rainfall. Many people have no idea what true darkness or quiet feels like. Within that inexperience, vicious cycles begin to spin. As we desecrate sensory environments, we become accustomed to the results. As we push the animals away, we get used to their absence. As the problems of sensory pollution grow, our willingness to address it subsides. How do we solve a problem that we don’t realize exists?”

HumanityTechnologyNoise PollutionLight PollutionSensory Pollution
Book:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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“She (Alexandra Horowitz, scientific expert on dog olfaction) notes ...that many dog owners deny their animals the joys of sniffling. To a dog, a simple walk is an odyssey of olfactory exploration. But if the owner doesn't undertand that and instead sees a walk as simply a means of exercise or a route to a destination, then very sniffy act becomes an annoyance...For Horowitz, the implications are clear: Let dogs be dogs. Appreciate their their Umwelt (world) is different, and lean into that difference. She does this by taking Finn (her dog) on dedicated smell walks...If he stops, she stops. His nose sets the pace. The walks are slower.”

Natural History Of Science
Book:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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“In 19951995, (scientist) Theunis Piersma showed that Red Knots find shellfish up to eight times more frequently than would be expected if they were doing random searches...As a knot's bill descends into the sand, it pushes on the thin rivulets of water between the rains, creating a pressure wave that radiates outward. If there's a hard object in the way - say, a clam or a rock - the water must flow around it, which distorts the pattern of pressure. The pits on the knot's bill tip can sense those distortions, detectings surrounding objects without having to make contact with them. This ability, which Piersma calls "remote touch" is impressive enough, but the knot improves it even further by probing the same areas repeatedly, stabbing its beak up and down several times a second. This stirs up the sand grains, which settle into a denser configuration, heightening the buildup of pressure from the beak and making the distortions more obvious. Every time the knot lowers its head, the foud around it becomes more obvious, as if it were using a kind of sonar based on touch instead of hearing.”

Natural History Of Science
Book:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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“...Thousands of years ago, one particular lineage got a taste for humans, who had recently started living in densely populated settlements. Drawn to these sites, Aedes aegypti transformed into an urban animal that prefers towns over forests and... is tuned to the distinctive cues of our bodies above all else. This mosquito is now among the planet's most effective hunters of humans, and is extremely picky about anything else.”

Natural History Of Science
Book:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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“But take a moment to consider the miracle... Light is just electromagnetic radiation. Sound is just waves of pressure. Smells are just small molecules. It's not obvious that we should be able to detect any of those things, let alone convert them into electrical signals or derive from those signals the spectacle of a sunrise, or the sound of a voice, or the scent of baking bread. The senses trans- form the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences-things we can react to and act upon. They allow biology to tame physics. They turn stimuli into information. They pull relevance from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany.”

Science
Book:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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“Even before vibrations are detected by its lyriform organs, the web determines which vibrations will arrive at the leg. The spider will eat whatever it's aware of, and it sets the bounds of its awareness--the extent of its Umwelt--by spinning different kinds of webs. The web, then, is not just an extension of a spider's senses but an extension of its cognition. In a very real way, the spider thinks with its web. Tuning the silk is like tuning its own mind.”

ScienceAnimals
Book:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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“...when [a black widow spider] is hungry, it can also draw its legs into a "crouch"--a sensory power pose that retunes its joints to higher frequencies...this stance might shift the spider's Umwelt toward the movements of smaller prey. It might also help it to ignore the low frequencies of wind. It's like a postural squint, which allows the spider to focus its attention. The analogy isn't exact, though, since squinting helps us to focus on particular parts of space. Here, the black widow's posture focuses on different parts of information space. It's as if a human could emphasize the red parts of our vision by squatting, or single out high-pitched sounds by going into downward dog.”

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