An Immense World by Ed Yong *****

An Immense World by Ed Yong explores the myriad senses. Aristotle recognized five senses: seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling. Animals have these senses but… Jumping spiders have eight eyes. Elephants can hear rumbles that humans cannot. Insects taste with their feet. The star-nosed mole feels with its nose. And mosquitoes can smell carbon dioxide. Beyond those senses, there are others for pain, heat, vibrations, echoes, electricity, and magnetic fields. Over 300 pages of wonderous creatures and the miracles of evolution.

“Philosophers have long pitied the goldfish in its bowl, unaware of what lies beyond, but our senses create a bowl around us too—one that we generally fail to penetrate.”

“For example, the OR7D4 gene creates a receptor that responds to androstenone, the chemical behind the stench of sweaty socks and body odor. To most people, it’s repulsive. But to a lucky few who inherit a slightly different version of OR7D4, androstenone smells like vanilla.”

“I ask Streets if [manta shrimp are] hard to train. “Oh my god,” she says, shaking her head slightly. They’re not motivated by food, because they don’t need to eat very often. They seem to lose interest very easily, so she can only test them once a day. “I swear to god they know what the task is but they’re just spiteful,” Streets says.

“Selka [the sea otter] had also been slowly unscrewing the nuts that held the table legs in place. One day, Sarah Strobel, a sensory biologist who had been working with the otter, found the entire platform tilting on its side. Selka was swimming around cradling a dislodged table leg, having stuffed the accompanying nuts and bolts down the drain.”

“He then offered the [octopus] a black-lidded jar containing a tasty crab. He hoped that she would unscrew the lid and extract the crab—a party trick that many octopuses are capable of, and that’s often offered as evidence for their intelligence. Qualia had unscrewed many jars in her time, but Grasso warned the audience that she may instead “decide to have a little pout and hang out in the corner.” Sure enough, that’s what she did.”

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