“A dolphin that echolocates a human is able to perceive its external shape, but also what it has inside. Tree frog embryos can sense the vibrations of a predator and dissolve the envelope that houses them, allowing them to escape,” Jennifer Szalai says in The New York Times. The new book by Ed Yong, science journalist for The Atlantic, is full of amazing facts regarding animal perception. “The fact that I have so often been surprised when reading An Immense World […] is a testament to Ed Yong’s storytelling skills,” Szalai continues. Quickly propelled to the rank of best-seller, the work is structured around a succession of stimuli associated with the corresponding senses, from smell to the ability of certain animals to detect the Earth’s magnetic field. Hardly focused on jargon, the author resorts to the German term environment (“environment”), which had been used by the pioneer of ethology Jakob von Uexküll to designate the perceptual world of an animal – its sensory bubble. …
