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

While reading this book my mind and heart opened up to the reality of how all animal life exist and evolved, or were created, and humankind, though we think we're superior, it just a part of how this beautiful miraculous earth exists in the universe.

Extensively referenced, this extraordinary work details how animal life around us experience this world. What we have in common, and how different we are. It’s not too late to be a good steward of our shared Earth. Yet.

The author makes complicated scientific research into animal senses, makes it simple to understand and keeps the reader engaged. Anyone who loves animals will see them in a completely new light after reading this well written book.

I love animals and kept seeing this book pop up. Intrigued I bought it, and man what a read it has been. This isn’t my usual book choice, but I was continually fascinated by the information presented in this book. He includes so much researchers’ work, interviews, and his own experiences. He includes so many different animals, from mammals to insects. We are taken on journey through different senses, and how different animals differ in using them or even what senses they are using. It also included that because we are limited to only our perception of reality, we fail to see how what we do affects so many animals around us in detrimental ways.I took my time with this book. I had to read it in shorter bursts, because it is A LOT of information. I feel like my brain grew when reading this. I am so happy that I stuck with it though! If you love animals, love to learn new things, enjoy developing understanding for things outside of yourself, you will absolutely love this book.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and this book shows how different those eyes can be. I can't recommend this book enough!

I tell everyone about the things I learned from this book! Current science in beautiful prose. I love this book!

A visual artist, I was in the market for an author who could supply an imaginative leap inside another species' sensory system. I thought it could provide perspective on our own, for one thing. Yong provides one simple animal's sensorium by page 7: a tick is (1) sensitive to body heat, (2) the touch of mammalian hair, and (3) the smell of butyric acid, which comes from skin. That's all it needs. Other creatures have much more elaborate, exotic sensory systems, for finding food, warding off predators, and attracting mates. scientists have devised incredibly ingenious tests to identify and measure animal sensoria, or Umwelten. Yong helps you experience your cat's or dog's Umwelt but dozens more. Why wonder what extraterrestrials might be like, Yong says, when unbelievable sensitivities are here among us and great strides have been made in studying them. Birds who can see ultraviolet rays, mammals sensitive to the slightest vibrations across hundreds of miles, insects attuned to sounds totally out of our range, all manner of marvels are here. Stephen Jay Gould was the high-water mark for me in science writing, but Yong is still better: he's the liveliest and most gifted communicator I've come across, using colloquialisms, metaphors and analogies ingeniously to vivify his thoughts. His easy eloquence as big an asset as the totally remarkable information he furnishes here. I worried that all this new information would need to be quite entertaining for an 80-year-old to remain interested, but amazingly, my attention never flagged.

loved this book. Humbles us to realize how limited is out own sense of the world. Our world is not the best, just one of many

視覚、聴覚、触覚、味覚、嗅覚が人間の５大感覚、そしてそれらを使える環境（Umwelt)内で我々は生活してます。哺乳類、鳥類も大体同様ですが、爬虫類、両生類などに味覚が存在するかは不明です。魚類、昆虫、クモ類、軟体動物などは味覚どころか視覚、聴覚などを持ってない種が大半です。つまり生物は種ごとに感覚が大きく異なり、それらに対応し、生活の環境（Umwelt)も大きく異なってきました。感覚器官進化イコール生物進化と言っても過言では有りません。人間の数百倍の嗅覚を持つ犬の鼻は、鼻孔の横に小さなスリットが有り、鼻孔から息を吐くとスリットから外気が入り込み臭いを嗅ぎ続ける事が可能です。又、フクロウは、ウサギや犬の縦長で地上平面に適した外耳では無く、大きく丸い顔がパラボラアンテナ（外耳）になり、顔で集音した音を目の横にある中耳に集め、3次元的に獲物の位置を把握します。イルカは嘴から音を発生させ、水中では音は空気中より早く、遠く届く性質を利用し何キロ先の仲間と交信します。頭の上の袋状器官で交信音を聞くのです。南氷洋と北極を回遊するシロナガスクジラは地磁気を感覚として捉え、移動すると推察されてますが、クジラ本体に磁気感覚器官は見つかってません。本書は、電場の乱れから獲物を捕らえたり、足裏で嗅覚する蚊、開口部の縁に目が点在するホタテ貝類など、生物の感覚器官は生きるため、環境に応じ、膨大な多様性の存在を説明してます。多くは21世紀に発見されてます。創造主ですら知らない、気が付かない生物の多様性を解説した著者の才能、好奇心、環境への関心が伝わってくる一冊です。著者、ED YONG氏、マレーシア生まれの中国系イギリス人、は１０代前半でイギリスに移住。COVID-19レポートでピュリッツァー賞。同じ東洋系でイギリスに移住したノーベル文学賞のカズオ・イシグロ氏を彷彿させます。イギリスも日本も落ち目なのですが、イギリスにはまだまだ人材を惹きつけ開花させる環境（Umwelt)が有り、日本には存在しない事実。三流文化国と成りつつある日本は、悲しくやり切れない現実です。

A fascinating look at the discoveries in the science of senses in animals, insects and us.You will look at and appreciate the world in a whole new way, guaranteed !!

This book will change the way you see the natural world around you!

Humane, imaginative, fascinating. If even one in a thousand people approached the animal world with this level of understanding and with as large a heart, we would already be living in a better world.

I read this book on holiday and found it a fascinating tour of animal senses. There are helpful insghts all along the way.Most significantly - though it should be obvious - that no creature can sense the whole of the immense world of potential stimuli available because that would be far too much data for it to process. Instead, selective stimuli are chosen which enable the creature to live and communicte in its own particular environemnt. Second, that we still know so little about some of these remarkable senses - for example the ability of some creatures to detect the earth's magnetic field. We really don't know all that much!Not wanting to find fault, but this comment may help the author, I did find the book very long! I personally would have preferred a shorter book which omitted some of the secondary material - for e.g. the conversations / visits with the relevant scientists. All interesting, but for me, I needed to wade through it, so to speak.I have given this book 4 stars rather than 5 because - and this is a criticism of most sciency/biology books today - the author is often blinded (and sometimes confused) by the paradigm of evolutionary theory. Since everything must fit into this outdated paradigm, there is little recognition of the way these astonishing fully developed sense organs point much more reasonably to a Creator than some blind impersonal forces at work, and second, no attempt to compare the senses human beings have, as a whole, to those in the animal kingdom, to show how unique our collection is for conscious communicating life.Of course, if human beings are also,like the animals, just the product of blind forces, why would you compare them with animals? I realize this wasn't the author's aim, and this paradigm blindness runs across all the sciences today, with notable exceptions such as Stephen Meyer and philosphers such as Thomas Nagel.