Ed Yong’s ‘An Immense World’ reveals how animals perceive the world
An Immense WorldEd YongRandom House, $30Emerald jewel wasps know what cockroach
An Immense World
Ed Yong
Random House, $30
Emerald jewel wasps know what cockroach brains feel like.
This comes in handy when a female wasp needs to turn a cockroach into an obedient zombie that will host her larvae and serve as dinner. First, the wasp plunges its stinger into the cockroach’s midsection to briefly paralyze the legs. Next comes a more delicate operation: stinging the head to deliver a dose of venom to specific nerve cells in the brain, which gives the wasp control over where its victim goes. But how does a wasp know when it’s reached the brain? The stinger’s tip is a sensory probe. In experiments using brainless cockroaches, a wasp will sting the head over and over again, searching fruitlessly for its desired target.
A brain-feeling stinger is just one example of the myriad ways animals sense the world around them. We humans tend to think the world is as we perceive it. But for everything that we can see, smell, taste, hear or touch, there’s so much more that we’re oblivious to.
In An Immense World, science journalist Ed Yong introduces that hidden world and the concept of Umwelt, a German word that refers to the parts of the environment an animal senses and experiences. Every creature has its own Umwelt. In a room filled with different types of organisms, or even multiple people, each individual would experience that shared atmosphere in wholly different ways.
Yong eases readers into the truly immense world of senses by starting with ones that we are intimately familiar with. In some cases, he tests the limits of his own abilities. Dog noses, for instance, are better than human noses at sniffing out a scent long after the source is gone, as Yong demonstrates. While crawling around on his hands and knees with his eyes closed, he was able to track a chocolate-scented string that a researcher had put on the ground. But he lost the scent when the string was removed. That wouldn’t happen to a dog. It would pick up the trace, string or no string.
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