Humans can't see a lot of the world that animals can.
Ed Yong, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, uses an example of a dark room, where a bird can pick up on the magnetic field of the earth, and know which way to fly. A dog would be smelling odors that a human wouldn't be able to detect. The presence of humans in a room could be detected by a rattlesnake.
Yong says that each creature could have a different experience of the space.
Yong explores the differences in perception between animals and humans in his new book, An Immense World. Each animal has its own sensory environment, which creates its own "bespoke of reality."
Yong says that a German Biologist named Jakob von Uexkll popularizedUmwelt. Von Uexkll wasn't using the word environment to mean the physical environment. The sensory environment, the unique set of smells, sights, sounds andtextures that each animal has access to, was what he meant.
The electric fields that sharks and platypuses can see can't be seen by humans. Birds and bees can sense ultraviolet light, but our ears and eyes can't hear it. He claims that imagining the world as animals see it opens up a new appreciation for nature.
You understand that nature is all around us if you start thinking about other animals. Yong says that it's in our backyard, in our gardens, and in the bodies of some of the most familiar creatures around us. It makes things that are familiar feel new.
Humans and insects have different levels of vision.
If you have a bee's ultraviolet vision, you can see patterns on flowers that we can't see. A stark ultraviolet bullseye at its center is what a sunflower would look like. The shapes of flowers like arrows and bullseyes are used to guide insects to the center of the flower. Crab spiders, for example, blend in against the flowers to our eyes, but really stand out when viewed in ultraviolet, and they act as a lure to insects. They are drawn towards the spider.
One of my favorite things about the relationship between insects and flowers is that if you took all the colors in the flowers, what kind of vision would you prefer? An eye that is maximally sensitive to blue, green and UV is what you get. You might think that the bee eye has become better at seeing flowers. The flowers evolved later than the bee eye did. The colors of flowers have evolved to tickle the eyes of bees, and I think that is a wonderful result. It means that beauty comes from the eye of the beholder.
On echo location.
Bats and dolphins use echolocation to see the world around them. They listen for the echoes of those calls after they've rebounded off objects around the animal. They get a sense of the world around them by listening to the echoes. A flying insect can be found by a bat in darkness. It can walk through darkness. This type of hearing can help it dodge obstacles.
The two masters of echolocation in the animal kingdom are the bat and dolphin. The dolphins echolocate in the water. The calls travel a lot further. For them, echolocation is a much longer-range sense than it is for bats, which can only detect a small insect in a small area. A dolphin's echolocation allows them to coordinate their movements, to coordinate their hunting strategies over the distance of an entire Pod echolocation can be used by dolphins. Hard surfaces can be found in other animals. A dolphin echolocating on a human could see many things. The swim bladders in fish can be detected through echolocation. By the shape of their swim bladders, they can tell the difference between prey. They are able to see through things. It isn't really to do with vision. It is related to sound.
The sound of dolphins is three-dimensional.
You don't think of making a three-dimensional representation of an object when you think about sound. I would like to hear a recording of someone playing an instrument. I can't think of a way to recreate the shape of a saxophone. dolphins are doing that They are able to echolocate on something. It seems as if they build a physical model of what that object looks like, which they can use as fodder for their other senses, so they can see the shape of an object on a screen. That is amazing. I think that shows how intelligent animals can use their extraordinary senses.
Some animals experience pain.
A good example would be to look at the animals that are related to them. If you hurt a squid, it doesn't seem to know where the pain is and it doesn't seem to have a local experience of pain. I know that my toe hurts. It's for a squid. Its entire body becomes sensitive. It's not like it's like, "Oh, my third arm hurts" A squid's arms may be short. A lot of its body can't be explored. It wouldn't be able to do anything about it if it knew part of its body was injured.
That isn't true for the long and dexterous arms of the octopus. They seem to have a feeling of pain. They seem to know which part of their body has been injured and will cradle and tend to it. There are different kinds of pain when you look at this group of animals. That is really important. When we think about pain in animals, we usually think of it as either yes or no. Some people think they don't experience pain the same way as animals do. In most cases, it's likely to be something in the middle, and their experience of pain is going to vary just like our experience of color or sound.
Cats sense a lot of things.
Many animals have cells that are sensitive to sound. I have them in my hands. Cats have that on their stomachs. I spoke to a scientist who had the idea that if a cat is laying down in a crouch, it might also be aware of what's going on around it. Is it possible for a lion to get information through the crouch when it sees a herd of animals in the distance? I want to make it clear that we don't know the answer to that question, and it might be far-fetched. I wrote about it in the book because I think it's the kind of question we should be asking, because a lot of people, including scientists who work on the senses, neglect the world of vibrations. When the air vibrates, we call them sounds. A lot of animals seem to pay attention to that world when they move through it. If you start to think about it and look at it, you can learn a lot about nature.
The attack on the World Trade Center disrupted bird migration.
The light is shining into the sky. It's pretty. That is a wonderful art installation. It's a big problem for birds that migrate. The light draws them in, causes them to circle for a long time, depletes their energy, and often distracts them. Birds can be caught in these beams. You can't afford to get distracted while you migrate. Birds need all the energy they can get in order to migrate. If enough birds get caught in them the lights are turned off for a while.
There are many lights at night that confuse birds and other animals. Animals are often killed by lights at night. This is a big problem. It's a new one. Animals have been living with these rhythms of light and darkness for the entire planet. In the last couple of centuries, the rhythms have been broken by the constant nighttime illumination. We don't think of light as a problem because we think of it as a good thing. It is a challenge for the natural world. The consequences can be very bad.
Understanding umwelt has made him think of nature differently.
We lose the motivation to save and to protect nature if we think of nature as remote and distant only to a person who can visit a national park.
Ed Yong is a young man.
We lose the motivation to save and to protect nature if we think of nature as remote and distant only to a person who can visit a national park. I can go on an adventure just by thinking about the sensory world of the sparrow that sits on the house next to me if you understand that nature is everywhere. Nature feels close to me, close to my heart, and close to my life. People will be more motivated to protect it if that is the case. It's not just about saving whales or pandas, it's also about protecting nature. Each of those things has a unique way of experiencing the world that is worth learning about and worth protecting.
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