Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is this podcast will
Speaker 1: Kill You. Welcome everyone to the final episode in the
Speaker 1: tp w k Y Book Club miniseries. Over the past months,
Speaker 1: we have read some wonderfully fashining and impactful books and
Speaker 1: covered a whole lot of ground when it comes to
Speaker 1: public health and medicine and biology and history. So much ground,
Speaker 1: in fact, that I'm going to skip the usual shpiel
Speaker 1: I give where I attempt to list or describe all
Speaker 1: the books we've read. Whether this is your first time
Speaker 1: tuning in to one of these episodes, or whether you've
Speaker 1: been here from the beginning. Thank you so very much
Speaker 1: for joining me, and to all the authors who have
Speaker 1: been so amazing to come onto the podcast and answer
Speaker 1: my many questions, a tremendous thank you. I'd love to
Speaker 1: bring this miniseriies back next season, so please reach out
Speaker 1: with your book recommendations for future episodes and your thoughts
Speaker 1: on past episodes. While I'm sad that this marks the
Speaker 1: end of the book Club for now, I am so
Speaker 1: incredibly excited for this episode because I got to chat
Speaker 1: with another of my heroes of science communication, Ed Young,
Speaker 1: about his latest book, An Immense World. How animal senses
Speaker 1: reveal the hidden realms around us. Yong, who was awarded
Speaker 1: a Pulitzer Prize in twenty twenty one for his reporting
Speaker 1: on the COVID pandemic and whose previous book on Microbiomes,
Speaker 1: I Contain Multitudes was a New York Times bestseller, transforms
Speaker 1: and expands reader's perception of the world around us with
Speaker 1: his latest work, to describe an immense world as simply
Speaker 1: a tour of the senses, though accurate, would, I think,
Speaker 1: fail to capture the wonder and magic found on every page.
Speaker 1: Through Yong's immersive and poetic writing, each chapter focuses on
Speaker 1: a different sense and the many ways that animals experience
Speaker 1: that sense, though, as Yong points out early on, the
Speaker 1: borders among senses are often fluid. Starting out with the
Speaker 1: senses that most humans are familiar with, things like taste
Speaker 1: and touch and smell and sound, Yong reveals that while
Speaker 1: we may be able to imagine what it's like for
Speaker 1: us humans to taste a bar of chocolate, or smell
Speaker 1: freshly brewed coffee, or feel a soft piece of velvet,
Speaker 1: we can only begin to try to conceive the vast
Speaker 1: array of smells our dog can detect. When he sniffs
Speaker 1: the telephone pole that all the neighborhood dogs like to
Speaker 1: pee on, or what a catfish experiences through the taste
Speaker 1: buds all over its skin, or how the world feels
Speaker 1: through the tentacled nose of a star nosed mole. And
Speaker 1: those are the senses for which we at least have
Speaker 1: somewhat of a reference point. Our imagination skills get put
Speaker 1: to the true test in later chapters, detailing senses such
Speaker 1: as electro reception and magneto reception Throughout. Yong is an
Speaker 1: incredible guide, writing with such skill and delight, accomplishing the
Speaker 1: tremendous feet of bringing to life the world around us,
Speaker 1: not as it is experienced by human senses, but by
Speaker 1: a myriad of animal species. He encourages readers to resist
Speaker 1: the temptation to rank species or make lists of the
Speaker 1: top ten best smellers or those with the best color vision,
Speaker 1: and instead appreciate the unique sensory world of each species,
Speaker 1: how these senses evolved, and why they are important to
Speaker 1: each animal. Just as fascinating as these sensory worlds that
Speaker 1: Yong beautifully describes is the research done to try to
Speaker 1: understand them. How do you measure the range of colors
Speaker 1: a peacock, mantis shrimp seas, or the pain or lack thereof,
Speaker 1: experienced by the thirteen lined ground squirrel as it hibernates
Speaker 1: through winters with temperatures that we'd find unbearable, Or the
Speaker 1: way a European robin or loggerhead turtle uses the Earth's
Speaker 1: magnetic field to navigate incredibly long distances. Yong's interviews with
Speaker 1: a frankly mind boggling number of research demonstrate the constantly
Speaker 1: evolving and innovative field of sensory ecology and reveal some
Speaker 1: of the most pressing challenges, including the current and future
Speaker 1: impact of sensory pollution, a topic which she explores in
Speaker 1: the book's riveting final chapter. It's not often that a
Speaker 1: book like An Immense World comes along, one that truly
Speaker 1: changes the way you perceive the world and leaves you
Speaker 1: with a profound sense of wonder and appreciation. If you
Speaker 1: can't already tell, I absolutely loved this book, and not
Speaker 1: just because I devoured the Anamorph's book series as a kid,
Speaker 1: which has a ton of fun animal sense thought experiments,
Speaker 1: but because of the endless revelations hidden within and the
Speaker 1: deep sense of curiosity that shines through each page. I
Speaker 1: am so delighted to get to chat with Ed Young
Speaker 1: about an immense world. So let's just take a quick
Speaker 1: break here and get right to it. Ed, thank you
Speaker 1: so very much for being here today. I am such
Speaker 1: a huge fan of your work, and I especially loved
Speaker 1: your most recent book, and Immense World. It really has
Speaker 1: stuck with me and changed the way that I think
Speaker 1: about how we perceive the world. I'm constantly thinking like, Okay,
Speaker 1: what am I seeing or smelling or hearing? That is
Speaker 1: you know what am I missing? Especially And I will
Speaker 1: also say that my dog is a huge fan of
Speaker 1: your book also, because now on our walks I'm much
Speaker 1: more patient and I'm like, you know what you smell?
Speaker 1: That dog poop as long long as you want. There
Speaker 1: must be more there that I can't tear you away.
Speaker 2: So I love this for them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's very appreciative. So tell me how did this
Speaker 1: book come to be?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: Where did you get the idea to tackle such an
Speaker 1: enormous topic?
Speaker 2: You know? The short answer is from my wife. The
Speaker 2: longer answer is that I've been writing about interesting animal
Speaker 2: behavior for as long as I've been writing about science,
Speaker 2: and this topic about how animals sense the world around
Speaker 2: them has always been one of the things that I've
Speaker 2: one of the threads that I've picked at over those years.
Speaker 2: It's also thread that my wife picked at in her
Speaker 2: graduate work she did. She started a PhD studies on
Speaker 2: the vision of coral reef fish, like how they see color.
Speaker 2: She has this very strong aesthetic sense, so she's always
Speaker 2: been interested in the senses in color, in vision in
Speaker 2: the marine world. And we were talking in late twenty
Speaker 2: eighteen about what I would do as a second book.
Speaker 2: And I say talking, I really mean that I was
Speaker 2: sort of complaining and self flagellating, and she very patiently
Speaker 2: listened to me and then suggested that this was a
Speaker 2: topic that was worthy of like book length exploration. And
Speaker 2: she was completely right, because, you know, I hope this
Speaker 2: comes across in the book. I think it's not just
Speaker 2: rich in terms of science. It's not just a series
Speaker 2: of fascinating discoveries, although it certainly offers that. I think
Speaker 2: it's also very, very philosophically rich. You know, it just
Speaker 2: provides so much food for thought, and I really wanted
Speaker 2: to bring that to the page and to literally every page,
Speaker 2: you know, I really wanted to give readers a pause
Speaker 2: almost every page for them to really sit back and
Speaker 2: think about the experiences of other creatures around them.
Speaker 1: One of the kind of both philosophical I suppose and
Speaker 1: biologically useful terms that you revisit throughout the book and
Speaker 1: introduce early on is umveldt, which I hope I'm saying right.
Speaker 2: So who guess is as good as mine? Okay, excellent
Speaker 2: apologies to German listeners, Yeah, boy, I will.
Speaker 1: Probably Can you explain what umveldt means and where this
Speaker 1: term originated?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the term is quite simple in that it
Speaker 2: is just German for environment, but in this context, in
Speaker 2: the context of which we're speaking. It was popularized by
Speaker 2: a German zoologist named Jakovan Uskel in the early twentieth century,
Speaker 2: and he used it in a very particular way, not
Speaker 2: to refer to the physical environment around us, but to
Speaker 2: the sensory environment. And that's the kinds of information the sights,
Speaker 2: the sounds, the textures, the smells that each creature or
Speaker 2: even each individual can perceive. In Nux school's key idea
Speaker 2: was that the umvelt is unique to every animal, and
Speaker 2: that every animal has a different way of experiencing the world.
Speaker 2: So one example that gave was it was a tick,
Speaker 2: a bloodsucking arachnid whose unveldt is very limited. It might
Speaker 2: consist of the feel of body hair of the mammal
Speaker 2: hosts that it sucks blood from. It includes the body
Speaker 2: heat of those hosts, It includes the smell of their skin,
Speaker 2: but it doesn't include like most of the things that
Speaker 2: we can see, it doesn't include color, it doesn't include
Speaker 2: a lot of things we can hear. It's a very
Speaker 2: thin sliver of our unveldt. But Uxkill's key realization was
Speaker 2: that our unveldt, what humans can perceive, is also limited.
Speaker 2: There's so much about the world around us that we
Speaker 2: are not privy to and that many other animals, sometimes
Speaker 2: most other animals can sense. And that includes things like
Speaker 2: the magnetic field of the earth itself, which sea turtles
Speaker 2: and songbirds can detect, the electric fields of other living things,
Speaker 2: which sharks and platypuses can sent, the ultra violet light
Speaker 2: that's all around us that actually most other living things
Speaker 2: that can see can detect. There is so much around us,
Speaker 2: even in the senses that we have enough familiar with,
Speaker 2: that is inaccessible to us except through tools or through technology,
Speaker 2: and even then not really. So this was I think
Speaker 2: this is a I'm really glad that this concept exists
Speaker 2: because it really does anchor the entire book. It tells
Speaker 2: us that even though our experience of the world feels complete,
Speaker 2: that is an illusion, and it is one that all
Speaker 2: animals share. We are each only perceiving just a thin
Speaker 2: slice of the allness of reality.
Speaker 1: The term is so useful, and I really want to
Speaker 1: kind of get into like, Okay, how are these senses
Speaker 1: being integrated together? But maybe I should take a step
Speaker 1: back and start at the beginning by saying what is
Speaker 1: a sense? Like what constitutes a sense? And how flexible
Speaker 1: is that definition? How rigid are the barriers around what
Speaker 1: we perceive to be a sense?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so the senses really are just about taking information
Speaker 2: that exists in the world around us and drawing meaning
Speaker 2: from them. And that's how I see it, right, And
Speaker 2: that information can take different forms. It could be electromagnetic
Speaker 2: radiation like light, that's how we see. It could be
Speaker 2: waves of pressure moving through the air that sound it's
Speaker 2: what we hear. It could be the textures that we feel.
Speaker 2: It could be electric and magnetic fields like I've talked
Speaker 2: about it could be molecules drifting through the air. That's
Speaker 2: what we smell. So the senses are ways of taking
Speaker 2: these actually quite abstract things and from them deriving knowledge
Speaker 2: about the world around us. You know. So light is
Speaker 2: not worth detecting just for its own sake. We detect light,
Speaker 2: we see because light gives us information about shelter, about
Speaker 2: the seasons, about where we are in the world, how
Speaker 2: deep we are in water, were the presence of predators
Speaker 2: and prey, and mates and rivals. You know, if you
Speaker 2: really think hard about it, like it's kind of miraculous
Speaker 2: that we can detect the stuff at all. You know,
Speaker 2: this is light really is just well it's either particles
Speaker 2: or ways, depending on which physicists you asked or but
Speaker 2: you know, it's kind of abstract stuff out in the world.
Speaker 2: Like the ability to actually turn that into an electrical
Speaker 2: signal that our brains can make sense of is sort
Speaker 2: of wondrous, just a base of it. You know. I
Speaker 2: say that in the book that in a way, the
Speaker 2: sensers are ways of biology, taming at taming physics, and
Speaker 2: that is very much how I how I see them.
Speaker 2: And you know, to your question of how how you
Speaker 2: define them and how porous the definition is. I would
Speaker 2: argue that they are very porous. You know, there's always
Speaker 2: there's this long standing thing in signs about whether you're
Speaker 2: a lump whether people are lumpers or splitters, like whether
Speaker 2: you're prone to put things together in categories or you know,
Speaker 2: actually focus on the differences between them. And you could
Speaker 2: take two those different approaches with the sensors, like how
Speaker 2: many sensors are there? Most people would say five. We
Speaker 2: say five because that's what Aristotle said and everyone has
Speaker 2: sort of accepted that sense. But even with humans there
Speaker 2: are more than that. There are things like propriception, which
Speaker 2: is the sense of where what my body is doing,
Speaker 2: Like if I'm sitting here and I know that where
Speaker 2: my arm is, even if I close my eyes, I
Speaker 2: know that because of appropriateception. And then when you go
Speaker 2: into other animals the number increases even more. But then
Speaker 2: you could start to combine the sensors together. You know,
Speaker 2: in many ways, hearing and touch are actually kind of
Speaker 2: the same. They have a shared evolutionary history. They're really
Speaker 2: about detecting mechanical disturbances in the world, whether that's you know,
Speaker 2: something pressing against your skin, or a sound wave deflecting
Speaker 2: your structures inside your ear. So you know, in the book,
Speaker 2: I noted that if you really wanted to be lumpy
Speaker 2: about this, you could argue that there are two sensors
Speaker 2: there's like chemical and mechanical, and then if you wanted
Speaker 2: to be super splitter about it, you could do maybe dozens.
Speaker 2: And I think that sort of speaks to what the
Speaker 2: sensors are doing, right, They are weaving something interesting out
Speaker 2: of things that are actually quite abstract. And how they
Speaker 2: do that you could kind of categorize in lots of
Speaker 2: different ways.
Speaker 1: If we talk about a sense in the traditional definition
Speaker 1: or in the traditional way that we think of it,
Speaker 1: there are tradeoffs in some of these senses, Like in vision,
Speaker 1: you discuss some of these trade offs, and so this
Speaker 1: is kind of a two parter. Number one, what are
Speaker 1: these trade offs within some of these senses? And the
Speaker 1: second question is are there also trade offs between different
Speaker 1: types of senses?
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. So yes, and this is crucial.
Speaker 2: I think this question is crucial because it actually gets
Speaker 2: at a really fundamental question, which is why do umbeldts
Speaker 2: exist in the first place. Why is it that each
Speaker 2: animal only perceives a small sliver of reality, like why
Speaker 2: don't we just perceive it all? And partly the answer
Speaker 2: is that we don't need to. So the senses have
Speaker 2: been tuned by evolution to give us what we need
Speaker 2: about the world around us. And no animal needs to
Speaker 2: sense everything. A staff has no need for eyes as
Speaker 2: sharp as an eagle, because the starfish isn't trying to
Speaker 2: spot prey from miles away. But there's also the fact
Speaker 2: that all of this stuff, all of the messy biology
Speaker 2: that allows us to detect things in the world, cost energy.
Speaker 2: Vision costs energy, Smell costs energy, and they don't cost
Speaker 2: energy just in the act of sensing. Like even if
Speaker 2: I close my eyes and my eyes don't seem to
Speaker 2: be doing anything, they are soaking up a large amount
Speaker 2: of my daily calorie budget just in the act of existing.
Speaker 2: And that's because the neurons in my eyes that allow
Speaker 2: me to see need to constantly maintain electrical gradients across
Speaker 2: themselves in order to be ready to fire when I
Speaker 2: actually use them. So the analogy I put in the
Speaker 2: given the book is that it's a bit like having
Speaker 2: to draw a bow and keep the string really taught,
Speaker 2: so that when the moment comes to fire, you can
Speaker 2: loose the arrow, but if you do that all the time,
Speaker 2: your arm is going to get really tired and it's
Speaker 2: going to take a lot of effort to keep that
Speaker 2: string Taught that, it's what it's like to own any
Speaker 2: kind of sense organ and it means that animals often
Speaker 2: hit a ceiling of like what kinds of senses they
Speaker 2: can invest in? Not all of them? How can they
Speaker 2: invest in those senses? They don't have infinite energy supplies
Speaker 2: to put to the task, and that means that the
Speaker 2: senses have limits. But they also the sensors also do
Speaker 2: have trade offs that go beyond the energy thing. So
Speaker 2: with vision, for example, you can either have an eye
Speaker 2: that has extremely high resolution so imagine lots of pixels
Speaker 2: in the image, really sharp eyesight, or you can have
Speaker 2: an eye that works that is incredibly sensitive and that
Speaker 2: works really well in the dark. And you absolutely cannot
Speaker 2: have both because the kinds of eye that are really
Speaker 2: good for resolution suck its sensitivity and vice versa. So
Speaker 2: there's just an inevitable trade off there that always happens,
Speaker 2: and it means that for example, an animal like us
Speaker 2: humans have some of the most acute eyes in the
Speaker 2: animal kingdom, but the minute the lights go off, we're helpless.
Speaker 2: We can't see very well at all, whereas something like
Speaker 2: a lion can see really well in the dark, but
Speaker 2: its eyesight isn't actually very sharp, and that's why to
Speaker 2: a hunting lion in the dark that line will be
Speaker 2: able to see a zebra, but will not be able
Speaker 2: to make out the zebra stripes.
Speaker 1: As you talk about also in the book, most of
Speaker 1: these senses aren't being used independently or in isolation ever,
Speaker 1: It's all part of this massive information gathering process. So
Speaker 1: how do different senses interact? Which is a very big,
Speaker 1: open ended question, but I guess maybe more specifically, are
Speaker 1: there certain pairs of senses that are more likely to
Speaker 1: be found in combination than others?
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a really interesting question. So to begin with, Yes,
Speaker 2: you're right that the senses always interact, and I think
Speaker 2: there's no animal that only uses one sense, and pretty
Speaker 2: confident in saying that like every animal is multisensory. They're
Speaker 2: trying to get as much information from the world as possible,
Speaker 2: and when you see how they do that, you get
Speaker 2: the sense. You get sense for the strengths and weaknesses
Speaker 2: of the different senses. Distance is a really important thing.
Speaker 2: So think about a shark that's hunting. As it's trying
Speaker 2: to track its prey. The first clues that it gets
Speaker 2: come from smell, which travel over very very long distances.
Speaker 2: Once the shark gets closer to its prey, vision becomes
Speaker 2: more important, and when it gets even closer still, then
Speaker 2: it's electric sense kicks in. That's the sense that allows
Speaker 2: it to detect the electric fields that all living things
Speaker 2: can't help but produce, especially in water. Now, the electric
Speaker 2: sense is amazing. It allows a shark to detect even
Speaker 2: buried prey, prey that it can't see, let alone smel.
Speaker 2: But the electric sense is very very short range, so
Speaker 2: it can't work over the kinds of distances over which
Speaker 2: things like light and scent can travel. So you know,
Speaker 2: different sensors work at different ranges. They might vary depending
Speaker 2: on how whether they are obscured by barriers, whether they
Speaker 2: can travel round, whether they work around corners, whether they
Speaker 2: work in the dark. And because each sense has its
Speaker 2: own strengths and weaknesses, that's why one of the reasons
Speaker 2: why animals rely on lots of them. You asked about
Speaker 2: censers in combination and some humans have this right, like
Speaker 2: a lot of people have synesthesia, where their perceptions from
Speaker 2: different senses are fused together. So certain concepts or textures
Speaker 2: might have a smell associated with them. You know, a
Speaker 2: smell might have a color associated with it. Those kinds
Speaker 2: of examples where the lines between the senses blur even more,
Speaker 2: I think are actually quite common in the animal world.
Speaker 2: So you know, an ant with its antennae is both
Speaker 2: smelling and touching at the same time, and I'm not
Speaker 2: sure that those things will feel very different to the ant.
Speaker 2: I think that it has a kind of chemical mechanical
Speaker 2: sense that fuses together. The same is likely true for
Speaker 2: an octopus. The octopus's suckers has receptors that taste and
Speaker 2: receptors that touch, and just because of the way those
Speaker 2: are wired together, I think it's likely that the octopus
Speaker 2: has a sense of taste touch. You know, perhaps when
Speaker 2: the arm makes contact with the surface, the octopus is
Speaker 2: tasting a shape or getting a feel of a flavor.
Speaker 2: And you know, again, those are just two examples, but
Speaker 2: I think that sort of thing is actually probably quite
Speaker 2: common in the animal kingdom.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting to talk about these, you know, just
Speaker 1: in the example that you gave there about taste, touch,
Speaker 1: and I think it kind of reveals in a way
Speaker 1: our limited vocabulary as humans for talking about other types
Speaker 1: of senses. And we also, I feel like, in general
Speaker 1: as humans use so many visual words or metaphors, and
Speaker 1: you talk about this in your book it's plain to
Speaker 1: see or from my point of view, and I mean,
Speaker 1: and that reveals in part how reliant we are as
Speaker 1: a species on vision. After writing this book, have you
Speaker 1: found yourself thinking more or being more aware of the
Speaker 1: vocabulary that you use and how it relates to certain senses.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I you know, I mean this is this was
Speaker 2: one of the biggest struggles with writing this book, that
Speaker 2: so much of our vocabulary for perception at all is
Speaker 2: visual in nature, and you know to the extent that
Speaker 2: it's not. There are only a few words that really
Speaker 2: capture what we're trying to do. Like feel is obviously
Speaker 2: touch based, but we use it in a kind of
Speaker 2: a nebulous way to you know, people talking about talk
Speaker 2: but also about feeling love or feeling hunger, which is
Speaker 2: actually quite different to the kind of sensing I'm describing
Speaker 2: in the book. So there's there are definitely sensors with
Speaker 2: much more limited vocabularies, including some of the more familiar
Speaker 2: ones to us, like smell. Smell greatly suffers from a
Speaker 2: lack of very specific words. Now you might be something
Speaker 2: there thinking like, oh, plenty of words to describe things
Speaker 2: I smell. Actually think about those words. Most of those
Speaker 2: are loan words from other senses, or they are like nouns,
Speaker 2: so like lemons, smell of lemon, right, Like, that's very
Speaker 2: different to the rich vocabulary we have to describe visual things.
Speaker 2: And then it gets even harder when you talk about
Speaker 2: things like electric fields or magnetic fields, where we really
Speaker 2: don't have any good vocabulary, where the vocabulary we do
Speaker 2: have fails opaque and jargony. And you know when when
Speaker 2: in the chapter in electric fields, I'm writing about concepts
Speaker 2: like voltage and capacitance, you know, there's nothing that that
Speaker 2: captures the the the very vivid sensations that words like
Speaker 2: bright or loud or rough can convey. So that was
Speaker 2: a challenge with the book. And you know, since since
Speaker 2: writing it, I have thought about this a lot, and
Speaker 2: if anything, it just it makes the the lack of
Speaker 2: the relevant vocabery just that much harder. You know, I'm
Speaker 2: I'm a writer. My job is to find words, and
Speaker 2: it really it kind of sucks. It gnaws on my
Speaker 2: soul when I when I can't do that. I'll give
Speaker 2: you an example, right, Like, we'll probably talk about dogs
Speaker 2: at some point. I have a dog. His name is Typo.
Speaker 2: He's He's wonderful, And as I'm trying to appreciate him
Speaker 2: sniffing the world around him, I also like I also
Speaker 2: sniff him, Like I know what my dog smells like,
Speaker 2: and he actually smells great. I like, I you know,
Speaker 2: we we cuddle a lot. Like I'll just like, you know,
Speaker 2: just snuffle along his like the top of his head.
Speaker 2: And I'm really interesting in the fact that different parts
Speaker 2: of his body smell differently, Like his back smells different
Speaker 2: to the top of his head, which smells different to
Speaker 2: like his feet, which smells different to like the backs
Speaker 2: of his ears. Like he has very distinct smells in
Speaker 2: different parts of his body, and I find that fascinating.
Speaker 2: Can I describe to you what those smells are? Like,
Speaker 2: I really cannot, I've really tried. I think this top
Speaker 2: of his head smells a little bit like cookies, Like
Speaker 2: it smells really nice, like a kind of you know,
Speaker 2: a sweet like bakingy flavor smell. But again, right like,
Speaker 2: I'm borrowing words from other things because I don't have
Speaker 2: the book Calbuary to describe the top the smell of
Speaker 2: the top of my dog's head, and that is kind
Speaker 2: of endlessly frustrating to me.
Speaker 1: I love, I'm so glad that you think that your
Speaker 1: dog smells so great, because I'm thinking my dog is
Speaker 1: just a stinky mess, like one day after a bath.
Speaker 1: He's a scruffy little scruffball. And his feet always smell
Speaker 1: like Frido's, which is a very my dog.
Speaker 2: Also, yeah, his feet also well you know, but I
Speaker 2: think it's weirdly. I think specifically one of his feet
Speaker 2: smells really strongly of Dorito's and the others kind of don't.
Speaker 1: That's amazing, Okay, now I need to I'm gonna have
Speaker 1: to smell each one of his feet and see you
Speaker 1: that's hilarious. And yeah, you know that that discussion in
Speaker 1: your book and also just sort of like right now
Speaker 1: when you were when you were talking about sort of
Speaker 1: language and vocabulary, was making me think or wonder if
Speaker 1: other animals could talk, what kind of metaphors or what
Speaker 1: kind of language they would use to relate to the
Speaker 1: world around them, and would it be like which sense
Speaker 1: would predominate? Would dogs talk in terms of smells? Would
Speaker 1: a bat talk about I can't, I don't have the vocabulary,
Speaker 1: but like the shape or feel of something in their mind? Like,
Speaker 1: it's just is interesting to think about what would be
Speaker 1: the leading dry their leading sense underneath these metaphors or
Speaker 1: vocabulary words.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so too. You know what, what would
Speaker 2: what would our descriptions of the world feel be like
Speaker 2: if they were rooted in the concepts of another sense?
Speaker 2: I think that's really fascinating to think about. And you know,
Speaker 2: you you I'm glad you mentioned bat. It's like the
Speaker 2: like The philosopher Thomas Snakeel is very famous for writing
Speaker 2: this essay called what is It Like to Be About,
Speaker 2: where he argued that it is very, very hard, it
Speaker 2: almost impossible, probably impossible, to really understand the subjective experience
Speaker 2: of another animal. You know, you could. You can understand
Speaker 2: how a bat echo locates, how it navigates through sound,
Speaker 2: but you'll never fully understand what it is like to
Speaker 2: experience the world in that way. And I think he's right.
Speaker 2: But this thought experiment, I think really shows the odd
Speaker 2: nature of some of these senses. So bat's echo, A
Speaker 2: lot of most bats echo okate. They produce these high
Speaker 2: pitched sounds, and they're listening out for the echoes that
Speaker 2: come back, and they're using the timing between the call
Speaker 2: and the echo to gauge distance between themselves and things
Speaker 2: in the world around them. That's how they can avoid
Speaker 2: obstacles in the dark, how they can hunt insects in
Speaker 2: the air. Technically, that's hearing, right, It's it's just sound
Speaker 2: listening for sound, and they're extracting information from that. But
Speaker 2: it works in a way that it's very different from
Speaker 2: the way we hear, which is a very passive thing.
Speaker 2: The that is producing energy, It is actively adding things
Speaker 2: to its environment and using that to sense the world,
Speaker 2: and it is doing that in a kind of exploratory way.
Speaker 2: And in many ways, echolocation is actually more similar to
Speaker 2: something like touch than it is to hearing. I think
Speaker 2: because of that exploratory aspect, that sort of thing becomes
Speaker 2: I think clearer when you think about something like a dolphin,
Speaker 2: which also echolocates in the water. So dolphin lokolocation, I
Speaker 2: think is incredible for lots of reasons. So One of
Speaker 2: them is that if a dolphin echo locates on an
Speaker 2: object in the water that it cannot see, it can
Speaker 2: then recognize that object if presented an image of it,
Speaker 2: even on a screen. Right, So it is creating some
Speaker 2: kind of mental representation in its mind of the object
Speaker 2: that it is analyzing through the use of sound, and
Speaker 2: using that to kind of feed one of its other sensors, vision.
Speaker 2: And I think it's really hard to think about that
Speaker 2: in terms of hearing, right, Like I could listen to
Speaker 2: the sound of my voice, can you reconstruct what my
Speaker 2: body looks like? No? Right, listen to a piano, a
Speaker 2: piece of piano music. You can't imagine if you'd never
Speaker 2: seen a piano before, you would never work out what
Speaker 2: a piano looks like. But a dolphin is using sound
Speaker 2: to reconstruct the shape of an object in a way
Speaker 2: that allows its eyes to actually recognize it too. And
Speaker 2: that feels more like touch to me. You know. That's
Speaker 2: like I'm closing my eyes now and I'm touching like
Speaker 2: a what am I touching? An adaptor on my desk
Speaker 2: And I can feel the shape of it. I can
Speaker 2: feel the prong, you know, I can draw you what
Speaker 2: this thing looks like and that's sort of how echolocation
Speaker 2: is operating. It is exploratory, and it feels quite like
Speaker 2: touch to be.
Speaker 1: We are going to take a quick break here, but
Speaker 1: when we get back, there is so much more of
Speaker 1: the animal world of senses to explore. Welcome back, everyone,
Speaker 1: let's get back into it. It's so interesting this discussion
Speaker 1: between active and passive sensing and how certain senses are
Speaker 1: active or passive or and I think you also bring
Speaker 1: this up in the context of taste and smell. I
Speaker 1: was kind of thinking, you know, you gave one example
Speaker 1: with the way that bats versus humans here essentially or
Speaker 1: you sound. Are there other senses like this that process
Speaker 1: information differently or passively versus actively, And what can those
Speaker 1: differences tell us about either how that information is used
Speaker 1: by that species or how important that senses to that
Speaker 1: species or yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a great distinction. So you know, most
Speaker 2: of the senses can be active in some way. Right,
Speaker 2: So I am sitting here and I am seeing things
Speaker 2: in front of me, but I can also look around,
Speaker 2: and I do, and that act of gazing around a
Speaker 2: scene is active. Similarly, like you can sniff with your nose,
Speaker 2: you can press and explore with your hands how to
Speaker 2: do with your ears on't it? You could like cut
Speaker 2: your hand around your ears to focus on something. But
Speaker 2: you can turn a lot of sensers into active acts
Speaker 2: of exploration. The crucial difference between those kinds of sensors
Speaker 2: and things like echolocation is that the latter are always active.
Speaker 2: Echolocation has no passive mode to it. It doesn't work
Speaker 2: at all if there is there is no echo, if
Speaker 2: there isn't a call in the first place, so it's
Speaker 2: always active. And the other sense that is like this
Speaker 2: is what's called electro reception, and that is a speciality
Speaker 2: of but a few hundred or so species of fish
Speaker 2: that live in Africa and South America and that produce
Speaker 2: their own electric fields. The famous electric eel is the
Speaker 2: most well known of these, but there are lots of
Speaker 2: others that are less dangerous. They produce their own electric fields,
Speaker 2: and they can sense how those fields are distorted by
Speaker 2: the objects around them, whether it's something insulating like a rock,
Speaker 2: or something that's conducting like another fish or a plant.
Speaker 2: So it produces the field, it senses how that field
Speaker 2: is distorted by those objects, and through that it censors
Speaker 2: the world around it. Again, it's quite like touch. It
Speaker 2: has been described as touch as a distance. It only
Speaker 2: works about a few inches or so away from the
Speaker 2: fish's skin, but it gives this the fish this kind
Speaker 2: of omnidirectional understanding of what's around it. Is there a
Speaker 2: morsel of food, Is there a rock? Is there a
Speaker 2: predator approaching imminently? It gets all of that In water
Speaker 2: that can be too hard to see, it can be
Speaker 2: too murky to see in it gets all of that
Speaker 2: in all directions. So electric fish are typically very, very
Speaker 2: good at doing things like swimming backwards, you know, or
Speaker 2: swimming upside down. It doesn't really matter. If you have
Speaker 2: this totally immersive three hundred and sixty degree understanding of
Speaker 2: your world through the sense, you're not limited to just
Speaker 2: the forward direction. The whole world is full of possibility
Speaker 2: to you. So this is another sense I think that
Speaker 2: is always active with. If the fish doesn't produce the
Speaker 2: electric field, it can't send the world around it. Now
Speaker 2: it can passively send electric fields as well, and a
Speaker 2: lot of living things give off electric fields, especially in
Speaker 2: the water. It's kind of different. That's more limited in applications.
Speaker 2: That's good for doing things like sensing other living things
Speaker 2: and at short distances, and then all of these things
Speaker 2: work together as a way of communication. So these electric
Speaker 2: fish can produce electric fields and use that as signals
Speaker 2: that other electric fish can detect, and they can send messages.
Speaker 2: They caught each other using electric communications. They fight and
Speaker 2: threaten each other using electric messages. There's a whole chorus
Speaker 2: of electric talk in a lot of the rivers of
Speaker 2: the world that we are not. And I think the
Speaker 2: thing that really really blows my mind about this is
Speaker 2: because this kind of sensing is always active, and so
Speaker 2: the fish needs to produce its electric field in order
Speaker 2: to understand the world around it. That's its primary sense,
Speaker 2: and because it uses those exact same fields to communicate
Speaker 2: with other fish. Now, the lines between perception and communication
Speaker 2: are really really blurry. So if I am trying to
Speaker 2: like wave someone down, that doesn't affect my vision. Right,
Speaker 2: those two things are separate to me. But that's not
Speaker 2: so for electric fish. Like when some electric fish fight,
Speaker 2: if one of them loses, it will often produce a
Speaker 2: submission signal, which means that it stopped producing its electric field.
Speaker 2: It shuts that down as a way of saying, I
Speaker 2: give in, but When it does that, it now loses
Speaker 2: the ability to sense the world around it. So it's
Speaker 2: like it's as if I wave a white flag and
Speaker 2: as part of that I have to close my eyes.
Speaker 2: You know, the communication and perception cannot be separated in
Speaker 2: these animals, and how that works, I think is really
Speaker 2: really interesting, both on an individual basis, and then just
Speaker 2: like if you think about the evolution of that, it
Speaker 2: starts getting really crazy.
Speaker 1: How much of this is predictable? You know, if we
Speaker 1: are provided a prompt that says, here's your environment, like
Speaker 1: the Arctic ocean or a North American temperate forest or
Speaker 1: the Sahara desert, and if you were given the size
Speaker 1: of an animal, the type of an animal, like is
Speaker 1: it a rodent? Is it a mastella? Is it a
Speaker 1: water bird? And then like they're feeding guild? How much
Speaker 1: can we guess about an organism sense, composition, or maybe
Speaker 1: which sense it primarily relies on.
Speaker 2: Oh, that's a really good question that I've not been
Speaker 2: asked before. I love that. I think you could make
Speaker 2: quite broad generic predictions that would probably hold up, but
Speaker 2: I think the details would always always surprise you because
Speaker 2: there's just so much flexibility in a lot of the senses,
Speaker 2: and I think there's just there's just tons of room
Speaker 2: for surprise. So let me give you an example, right, Like,
Speaker 2: caves are a good example of this because caves are
Speaker 2: environments that are notably dark. So one thing that is
Speaker 2: very common among cave animals is that they lose their eyes.
Speaker 2: You know, there are blind cavefish and blind cave salamanders
Speaker 2: and blind cave insects. Vision ain't much good if there
Speaker 2: is no light around, and that's a pretty obvious thing
Speaker 2: to to predict. But now what do you do instead
Speaker 2: of that? So a lot of blind cave fish have
Speaker 2: heavily invested in a sense organ called the lateral line
Speaker 2: that all fish have, and that allows them to sense
Speaker 2: the flow of water around their bodies. You could just
Speaker 2: take the basic lateral line and just soup it up,
Speaker 2: which seems to be pretty common among cavefish. Or you
Speaker 2: could do what one catfish in South America has done,
Speaker 2: which is sort of dispense with the lateral line almost
Speaker 2: entirely and instead create these little like joystick like things
Speaker 2: all over its body that turn out to be teeth.
Speaker 2: And I don't mean they're like teeth like tooth like things.
Speaker 2: I mean they're like actual teeth. They have like enamel,
Speaker 2: you know, they are their teeth and they this fish
Speaker 2: has turned has created this like body wide set of
Speaker 2: teeth that do the job of a lateral line in
Speaker 2: most other fish. I could not predicted that the scientists
Speaker 2: to discover this. Daphne Suarez absolutely did not predict that.
Speaker 2: You know, nothing of that has is obvious or predictable.
Speaker 2: So you know, sure that the fishes the fish is blind.
Speaker 2: Okayfish are blind, but what it has done instead is
Speaker 2: just that's that's ludicrous and wonderful and and I think
Speaker 2: very unpredictable.
Speaker 1: In your book, you bring up some incredible evolutionary arms
Speaker 1: races between species in terms of senses, like bats and moths,
Speaker 1: for instance. Did you come across one that you were like, Wow,
Speaker 1: this is my favorite sensory evolutionary arms race.
Speaker 2: Oh, honestly, I think you've hit on the best one.
Speaker 2: Bats and moths are are pretty classic, and I think
Speaker 2: they are incredible in the kinds of adaptations that they
Speaker 2: have produced in each other and in the fact that
Speaker 2: that story just keeps on changing. Right, So there's this
Speaker 2: idea that that echolocation evolved to allow them to hunt
Speaker 2: moths at night. But actually the timing of that doesn't
Speaker 2: really work, and that story that that has been sort
Speaker 2: of repeated in textbooks like actually probably isn't true. And
Speaker 2: so what the actual truth is I don't know, but
Speaker 2: it's it's it's a great tale. I think of an
Speaker 2: evolutionary arms race that is so textbook that you know,
Speaker 2: it's literally textbook it's and all the textbooks and most
Speaker 2: of those textbooks are kind of wrong about it. But
Speaker 2: then you know, regardless of how it originally started, like,
Speaker 2: bats and moths are unquestionably locked in this this tight
Speaker 2: arms race. Bats want to eat moths, moths don't want
Speaker 2: to be eaten, and as a result of that, both
Speaker 2: have incredible adaptations. So some moths can produce jamming clicks
Speaker 2: that corrupt that interfere with the sonar of bats. Moths famously,
Speaker 2: of all these scales and their bodies and their wings
Speaker 2: that acts as acoustic armor. It kind of deadens some
Speaker 2: of the sounds that come out from bats. Some moths
Speaker 2: have these very beautiful, elaborate tails at the end of
Speaker 2: their wings. If you've ever seen a lunar moth in
Speaker 2: North America, it's just a beautiful insect with these long streamers,
Speaker 2: and from its coming out of the hind wings, it
Speaker 2: looks like those are acoustic defenses too. They sort of
Speaker 2: flap and rotate as the moth flies, and they seem
Speaker 2: to mess with the bat's echo location. Maybe it's not
Speaker 2: entirely clear how. Maybe it just distorts the bat's perception
Speaker 2: of where the moth is. But whatever the case is,
Speaker 2: bats that attack lunar moths with intact tails tend to miss,
Speaker 2: and that's very rarely miss when they attack moths that
Speaker 2: don't have such defenses. And then you know, bats have
Speaker 2: evolved not just echolocation in its basic form, which is
Speaker 2: already incredible enough, but I think in very very specific,
Speaker 2: very tailored forms of colocation to sort of counter some
Speaker 2: of what moths can do. I think it's fascinating because
Speaker 2: these are not animals that people tend to love, right
Speaker 2: Like bats have often a bad reputation, moths are like,
Speaker 2: you know, I think a lot of people think of
Speaker 2: moths as like boring butterflies. One of the scientists I
Speaker 2: took to basically think some things of them in the
Speaker 2: other way around. They basically think of butterflies as like,
Speaker 2: you know, lame day flying moths.
Speaker 1: I love that. That's amazing. Yeah. So one of the
Speaker 1: ways that I think our human bias has perpetuated certain
Speaker 1: evolutionary narratives that we have told is the example that
Speaker 1: you just provided about bats and moths. But it struck
Speaker 1: me that there were so many other ones. I guess
Speaker 1: I shouldn't be surprised by this. Humans are biased in
Speaker 1: so many ways, but there were so many that you
Speaker 1: brought up in your book, And one that I thought
Speaker 1: was really interesting was sort of this story, this long
Speaker 1: time story that we've told about how zebras got their
Speaker 1: stripes and what these stripes do. So can you tell
Speaker 1: me a little bit about how research has changed what
Speaker 1: that story used to be and what we know today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. So one of the there
Speaker 2: have been a bunch of different hypotheses about why zebras
Speaker 2: are striped, and one of the most common ones is
Speaker 2: that it's for camouflage, so it makes the zebras harder
Speaker 2: to hunt. And you know, again there's variance of that. Right,
Speaker 2: Is it that the stripes cause confusion when the zebras run?
Speaker 2: Do they break up? The zebras outlined? They make it
Speaker 2: look a little bit like they allowed to blend into
Speaker 2: a mid vertical tree trunks. Whatever those sub ideas you
Speaker 2: want to pick, they are roll. They have to be wrong,
Speaker 2: and they have to be wrong because, as a Mandamelin showed,
Speaker 2: zebra predators can't make out zebra stripes. They just don't
Speaker 2: have eyes with high enough resolution. So a lion or
Speaker 2: a hyena at a kind of stalking distance cannot make out,
Speaker 2: cannot distinguish between the black and the white stripes. A
Speaker 2: zebra to its predators just looks like a gray donkey,
Speaker 2: and that, you know, stops being true at close distances.
Speaker 2: But at that distance, you know, the line can smell
Speaker 2: the zebra are the senses kicking? It cannot be for camouflage.
Speaker 2: And this was I think shown within the last decade
Speaker 2: or so. This is pretty recent stuff, and I think
Speaker 2: it shows that these very long standing ideas about the
Speaker 2: adaptive nature of specific animal traits can often be completely
Speaker 2: wrong if we're not actually considering how the audiences for
Speaker 2: those traits perceive the world. In case you're wondering, the
Speaker 2: current lead hypothesis for why zebras are striped is that
Speaker 2: they are anti fly adaptations. So there's something about those
Speaker 2: stripes that really confuse biting flies like horse flies. And
Speaker 2: this has been shown in some really wonderful experiments where
Speaker 2: scientists have taken like normal horses and put like zebra
Speaker 2: coats on them, or like painted horses with like zebra
Speaker 2: stripes and just watched flies trying to bite them, and
Speaker 2: the flies just flob the landing all the time. They
Speaker 2: can't seem there's something about the stripes that really really
Speaker 2: baffles them. And then you might ask like, well, then,
Speaker 2: why zebras and why isn't everything striped? Why am I
Speaker 2: not striped? I live in DC I would be very
Speaker 2: happy if nothing bit me, And I think and the
Speaker 2: answer to that it might be that there's something about zebra.
Speaker 2: Zebras have remarkably thick, thin skin compared to a lot
Speaker 2: of other horses, and they live in parts of the
Speaker 2: world where biting flies aren't just a nuisance but actually
Speaker 2: carry some pretty nasty diseases that horses can get. So
Speaker 2: there's something about these horses in this part of the world,
Speaker 2: with these insects carrying these diseases that mean that they
Speaker 2: have really really gone all in in some weird adaptation
Speaker 2: to stop themselves getting bitten by flies.
Speaker 1: It's an amazing story, and I love it. I love
Speaker 1: that it comes down to diseases. That's my that's my right.
Speaker 1: There another another place where I feel like human bias
Speaker 1: really shines is this growing problem of sensory pollution. I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask you to describe a few of the
Speaker 1: different types of sensory pollution and who, so far is
Speaker 1: the most impacted.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, So the ones that we know the most
Speaker 2: about are light pollution and noise pollution. So that's when
Speaker 2: we talk about sensory pollution, we're talking about stimuli that
Speaker 2: are in places where they don't belong at times when
Speaker 2: they don't belong. So lighting at night is actually a
Speaker 2: huge problem. It means that we have broken these twenty
Speaker 2: four hour cycles of light and dark that have been
Speaker 2: held in violate for billions of years and to which
Speaker 2: a lot of animals have adapted. When we shine light
Speaker 2: in spaces, we often push out a lot of animals
Speaker 2: that don't like it. We make things harder for things
Speaker 2: like pollinating insects. We lure a lot of insects to
Speaker 2: things like lampposts, often with fatal results. Light at night
Speaker 2: near the ocean can attract hatchling sea turtles or way
Speaker 2: from the ocean where they need to be again, often
Speaker 2: with fatal results. Light at night can waylay migrating birds
Speaker 2: that use celestial lights in the night sky to navigate again.
Speaker 2: This can be devastating for creatures that are already going
Speaker 2: on arduous treks and cannot afford to lose energy on
Speaker 2: being set of course. And then noise pollution is kind
Speaker 2: of similar. In a lot of the world is very quiet,
Speaker 2: or used to be, and because of planes and cars
Speaker 2: and the sounds of industry and the sounds of urban life,
Speaker 2: we have filled the world with noise in a way
Speaker 2: that's really harmful to a lot of animals that might
Speaker 2: it might drown out alarm calls or courtship calls. It
Speaker 2: might make it harder for parents and offspring to interact.
Speaker 2: One great experiment by Jesse Barber and his colleagues really
Speaker 2: spoke to this. They took they created a phantom road,
Speaker 2: you know, in some area of wilderness, by recording the
Speaker 2: sound of a busy highway and playing that sound from
Speaker 2: speakers attached to trees in an area where no cars were.
Speaker 2: So now you're taking away a lot of the bad
Speaker 2: things that come with roads. There's no risk of being
Speaker 2: hit by car because there aren't cars there. There's no exhausts,
Speaker 2: so there's no chemical problem. It's just the noise. And
Speaker 2: the noise alone was enough to reduce the number of
Speaker 2: birds in that area that's used by migrating birds by
Speaker 2: I think a third and a lot of the birds
Speaker 2: that remained were in worse condition because they spend a
Speaker 2: lot of time being alert, being watchful, and less time
Speaker 2: on doing things that they need to do, like foraging.
Speaker 2: These are just a few examples, but I think that
Speaker 2: the effects of light and noise pollution are pervasive, and
Speaker 2: I think they have costs for us too as humans.
Speaker 2: I think they disconnect us from our appreciation of nature,
Speaker 2: and they make nature seem remote and far away. Most
Speaker 2: people in the US, and really in North American and
Speaker 2: Europe have never seen true darkness. Most people have never
Speaker 2: seen the milky Way, a thing that I think is
Speaker 2: breathtakingly beautiful but really is only visible in the darkest
Speaker 2: of places. And then noise pollution also drowns out the
Speaker 2: sounds of animals around us. There are good reasons why
Speaker 2: at the start of the pandemic a lot of people
Speaker 2: only talked about hearing bird birds around them for the
Speaker 2: first time. It wasn't that nature was healing and that
Speaker 2: birds were suddenly flocking to those areas. It was that
Speaker 2: the typical levels of noise that we produce in city
Speaker 2: life makes it impossible to hear birds around us and
Speaker 2: greatly shrinks the range over which we can hear natural noises.
Speaker 2: So I've described in the book sensory pollution as the
Speaker 2: pollution of disconnection. It severs the relationships between animals and
Speaker 2: each other, and it severs our relationship from the animals
Speaker 2: around us. It makes nature feel like something not a
Speaker 2: part of our lives, and actually it's all around us,
Speaker 2: you know. Part of what I hope to convey in
Speaker 2: this book is that there is wonder and wilderness to
Speaker 2: be found even in the most familiar creatures, in the
Speaker 2: most mundane settings. You know, I can wax lyrical about
Speaker 2: what the sparrows in the tree outside my house, see
Speaker 2: what my dog experiences when he walks down the streets.
Speaker 2: These are magical and kind of miraculous things. And I
Speaker 2: think if we think about the experiences of other animals,
Speaker 2: and if we do our best to try and create
Speaker 2: a world in which they can a world that is
Speaker 2: catered to their unveult as well as to ours, then
Speaker 2: you know we can appreciate those those incredible aspects of
Speaker 2: the world around us a bit better.
Speaker 1: What an amazing way to close out this Susan's book Club. Ed,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for taking the time to chat
Speaker 1: with me today and for being just an incredible science communicator.
Speaker 1: If you all enjoyed this interview and would like to
Speaker 1: learn more about the sensory world of animals, check out
Speaker 1: our website this podcast will kill You dot com. We're
Speaker 1: I'll post a link to where you can find an
Speaker 1: immense world how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us,
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