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

Whenever an animal moves, it unconsciously creates a mirror version of its own will, which it uses to predict the sensory consequences of its actions. With every action, the senses are forewarned about what to expect and can prepare themselves accordingly.

Equating wilderness with otherworldly magnificence treats it as something remote, accessible only to those with the privilege to travel and explore. It imagines that nature is something separate from humanity rather than something we exist within. “Idealizing a distant wilderness too often means not idealizing the environment in which we actually l

In the three-dimensional world of the deep ocean, above and below matter as much as in front and behind.

“They move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear,” wrote the American naturalist Henry Beston. “They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and tr

We have used technology to make the invisible visible and the inaudible audible. This ability to dip into other Umwelten is our greatest sensory skill.

He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says.

Could pain exist without consciousness? If you strip the emotion out of pain, are you just left with nociception, or a gray area that our imaginations struggle to fill? Perhaps more than for other senses, it is easy to forget that pain can vary, and hard to conceive of how it might.

Much like color, it is inherently subjective and surprisingly variable. Just as wavelengths of light aren’t universally red or blue, and odors aren’t universally fragrant or pungent, nothing is universally painful,

A scientist’s explanations about other animals are dictated by the data she collects, which are influenced by the questions she asks, which are steered by her imagination, which is delimited by her senses. The boundaries of the human Umwelt often make the Umwelten of others opaque to us.