An Immense World, Ed Yong

This is a book about animals as animals. It’s a book not about superiority but about diversity. Animals are not just stand-ins for humans or fodder for brainstorming sessions. He explores their senses to better understand their lives. How billions of species share the same physical space but experience it in wildly and wondrously different ways. There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin. Each chapter is a gateway into the varied things that animals do with each stimulus. He lets us know how animals use their senses and attempt to step inside their own being. He stops to savor the delightful world of color, pain, and heat; through the mechanical senses that respond to pressure and movement. I read about experiencing sensory travelers whose imaginations have been fully primed, and strange senses that animals use to detect the electric and magnetic fields we cannot, how animals unify the information from their senses, how humans pollute and distort that information, and where our responsibilities to nature now lie. A fascinating book.