The Amazing Nature of Animal Senses

Ed Yong Author

03/26/2025 Added

21 Plays

Description

Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist, 2024 Guggenheim Fellow and author of An Immense World and I Contain Multitudes. In this engaging lecture, Yong will take audiences through the hidden realms of animal senses. With wit and humor learn the amazing ways in which animals perceive aspects of the world to which we are oblivious.

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[00:00:00.489](bright music)
[00:00:07.170]Today you are at the heart
[00:00:08.610]of an inspiring dialogue shaping our collective future.
[00:00:12.690]The E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues brings together
[00:00:16.170]myriad perspectives on international
[00:00:18.510]and public policy matters.
[00:00:20.940]It fosters understanding
[00:00:22.800]and ignites spirited debate across both our university
[00:00:26.507]and the vibrant community of Nebraska.
[00:00:30.090]Since its inception in 1988,
[00:00:32.790]this thought provoking forum has welcomed countless
[00:00:36.210]distinguished speakers
[00:00:37.950]whose insights have not only challenged
[00:00:40.050]but also uplifted us.
[00:00:42.270]Along the way, it has solidified its place
[00:00:45.240]among the foremost speaker series in higher education.
[00:00:49.620]It all began with the vision of E.N. Jack Thompson,
[00:00:53.610]whose passion for global issues stemmed
[00:00:56.070]from his diverse career and life experiences,
[00:00:59.250]including his travels as a young journalist,
[00:01:02.100]his role in the founding of the United Nations
[00:01:05.095]and his work at the Carnegie Endowment
[00:01:07.380]for International Peace.
[00:01:09.750]As president of the Cooper Foundation in Lincoln,
[00:01:12.840]Jack and his network of community leaders
[00:01:15.750]and strong connections to the university led
[00:01:18.480]to the formation of this collaborative effort.
[00:01:22.050]The Cooper Foundation pledged major financial support
[00:01:25.253]and the University of Nebraska Lincoln
[00:01:27.960]and the Lied Center for Performing Arts joined as partners.
[00:01:32.010]Later, Jack and his wife Katie
[00:01:34.500]established the Thompson Family Fund
[00:01:36.719]to help sustain this transformative form
[00:01:39.572]and its broader initiatives.
[00:01:42.600]Today we are grateful for the generous support
[00:01:45.810]of the Cooper Foundation,
[00:01:47.610]Lied Center for the Performing Arts,
[00:01:50.070]the University of Nebraska Lincoln,
[00:01:52.290]whose partnerships continue to enrich this vital program.
[00:01:56.670]We hope today's event kindles a dynamic exchange
[00:01:59.940]and sparks new ideas
[00:02:01.410]and fresh perspectives that you will take with you far
[00:02:04.590]beyond this gathering.
[00:02:06.510]And now let the conversation begin.
[00:02:09.813](bright music)
[00:02:19.710]Welcome to the E.N. Thompson Forum on World Issues.
[00:02:23.400]I'm Shari Vail,
[00:02:24.570]Chair of the E.N. Thompson Forum Program Committee
[00:02:27.420]and the Jane T. Olson Endowed Dean of the College
[00:02:29.970]of Journalism and Mass Communications
[00:02:31.950]here at the University of Nebraska Lincoln.
[00:02:34.860]I'm excited to be with you
[00:02:36.330]for our third forum event of the season.
[00:02:39.540]Welcome to those of you watching the live stream
[00:02:42.090]or broadcast
[00:02:43.260]and to all of you here at the Lied Center tonight.
[00:02:47.010]We ask that you please refrain from flash photography
[00:02:50.400]or video recording during tonight's presentation.
[00:02:54.750]Since 1988, the Thompson Forum has brought us
[00:02:58.140]critical thinkers, policy makers,
[00:03:01.080]and leaders who are shaping our global society
[00:03:04.920]to discuss issues that affect us all.
[00:03:08.640]We are grateful to the Cooper Foundation,
[00:03:11.070]which provides the major funding for the Forum
[00:03:13.980]to the late Jack Thompson who conceived of this series
[00:03:17.970]and to the Thompson family for their continued support.
[00:03:21.750]We would also like to acknowledge the Lied Center
[00:03:23.970]for Performing Arts
[00:03:25.200]and the university honors program
[00:03:27.300]for their ongoing partnership of the Thompson Forum,
[00:03:30.870]as well as our media sponsors KZM and 90.3 KRNU.
[00:03:37.560]The Thompson Forum would like
[00:03:39.090]to also thank our event co-sponsor,
[00:03:41.580]the University of Nebraska Lincoln College of Journalism
[00:03:44.310]and Mass Communications Hearst Lectureship.
[00:03:47.820]This season's theme Lessons from the Natural World
[00:03:51.810]explores the beauty, wonder and wisdom of our living planet
[00:03:56.670]and the vast universe.
[00:03:58.770]It's been an incredible season so far as we started off
[00:04:02.280]with a conversation with Amy Tan as part
[00:04:04.950]of the governor's lecture in the humanities.
[00:04:07.890]Then we enjoyed nature journaling workshops
[00:04:10.020]with poet, professor and author Aimee Nezhukumatathil.
[00:04:15.240]We will wrap up the series in collaboration
[00:04:17.790]with the Lied Center for Performing Arts
[00:04:19.950]with Neil deGrasse Tyson on April 22nd.
[00:04:24.990]Earlier this evening we announced the winners
[00:04:27.330]of our lessons from the Natural World Photo Contest.
[00:04:30.990]Congratulations to our five winners, Logan Trimberger
[00:04:35.190]for People's Choice Award.
[00:04:37.260]Jaden C for the K-8 category.
[00:04:41.160]Sammy Leonards for grades 9-12,
[00:04:44.610]Caden Connolly for undergraduates
[00:04:47.400]and Dakota Altman for adults.
[00:04:51.210]Each winner received tickets to Neil deGrasse Tyson
[00:04:54.180]and other age appropriate prizes.
[00:04:57.540]Special thanks to the Center for Great Plain Studies
[00:05:01.590]for Wild Great Plains Conference, registrations, maps
[00:05:04.920]and more store for nature related gifts.
[00:05:07.710]The University of Nebraska Bookstore
[00:05:09.570]and Humanities Nebraska for books by this year's speakers
[00:05:13.140]and the Cooper Foundation for books
[00:05:14.880]by photographer Michael Forsberg.
[00:05:17.640]Thank you to our judges Robert Durr, Dominique Ellis,
[00:05:21.480]Brian Garrick and Sean Hill.
[00:05:26.010]Tonight we have the privilege
[00:05:27.630]of hearing from Ed Yong,
[00:05:29.430]Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist,
[00:05:31.890]the 2024 Guggenheim fellow and author
[00:05:35.490]of an "Immense World" and "I Contain Multitudes".
[00:05:39.420]This afternoon Ed visited students in the college
[00:05:42.150]of Journalism and Mass Communications
[00:05:44.280]and we are grateful
[00:05:45.480]that our students had this special opportunity to meet
[00:05:48.120]with him and learn from him.
[00:05:51.270]Following tonight's talk, we will have a short Q&A
[00:05:54.390]where you can participate by texting ent498
[00:05:59.460]to the number 22333
[00:06:02.490]or by going to PollEv.com/ent498
[00:06:08.910]on your computer or browser at home.
[00:06:11.820]And then after tonight's presentation,
[00:06:14.490]Ed Yong will be available
[00:06:15.780]to sign books at the orchestra level.
[00:06:19.680]The E.N. Thompson forum would like
[00:06:21.450]to formally acknowledge the indigenous tribal nations
[00:06:24.180]as the original stewards of the land
[00:06:26.460]and that we reside on the past, present
[00:06:28.708]and future homelands of the Pawnee Ponca,
[00:06:33.090]Otoe, Missouria, Omaha, Dakota, Lakota, Kaw, Cheyenne
[00:06:38.820]and Arapaho Peoples as well as those
[00:06:41.660]of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox and Iowa peoples.
[00:06:46.560]Through our acknowledgement,
[00:06:48.300]we work to develop positive ongoing relationships
[00:06:51.660]to our indigenous tribal nations
[00:06:53.760]and the rich tribal diversity in the state of Nebraska.
[00:06:58.530]Now I have the honor of introducing this evening speaker
[00:07:03.390]named the Most Important
[00:07:05.070]and Impactful Journalist of 2020 by Poynter
[00:07:09.030]Pulitzer Prize winner, Ed Young is the bestselling author
[00:07:12.780]of an "Immense World".
[00:07:14.790]In 2021, he was awarded
[00:07:16.800]journalism's top honor the Pulitzer Prize
[00:07:19.710]for explanatory reporting for his crucial coverage
[00:07:23.400]of the pandemic, a beat that left him struggling
[00:07:27.150]with mental health challenges and burnout.
[00:07:30.720]Now he talks about a new passion birdwatching
[00:07:34.920]and the positive impact of nature on mental health.
[00:07:39.660]An accomplished speaker Yong
[00:07:41.880]brings his vast scientific knowledge
[00:07:43.920]and engages his audiences
[00:07:45.810]through his insightful conversations
[00:07:47.880]about the animal kingdom,
[00:07:49.680]the challenges of science journalism
[00:07:52.530]and the joys of the natural world.
[00:07:55.380]Please join me in welcoming to the stage
[00:07:58.534]award-winning science journalists Ed Young.
[00:08:04.072](audience applauding)
[00:08:19.380]This is my dog, his name is Typo.
[00:08:22.877](audience laughs)
[00:08:23.710]It's a good name for a writer's dog.
[00:08:27.210]Typo is at home now and is very aggrieved at the fact
[00:08:29.430]that his dad keeps on disappearing for two days at a time.
[00:08:31.770]He's come to view the travel suitcase
[00:08:33.900]with suspicion and contempt.
[00:08:38.880]When people first see Typo, they tend to focus on his eyes,
[00:08:42.270]which are extremely cute
[00:08:43.710]and his ears which are extremely cute.
[00:08:47.880]I instead want you to try if you can,
[00:08:50.400]to tear your attention away from the cuteness
[00:08:53.460]of all the above and focus instead on his nose.
[00:08:58.020]It is the most important
[00:08:59.430]of the sense organs on the adorable face.
[00:09:02.220]It is the seat of his sense of smell of all faction,
[00:09:05.730]the main way through which he perceives the world
[00:09:08.460]as important to him as vision is to me.
[00:09:12.390]When Typo encounters anything new in his environment,
[00:09:15.600]he sniffs it enthusiastically and excitedly.
[00:09:20.280]It's how he gains information about the world.
[00:09:23.610]When we go on walks,
[00:09:26.190]we try and allow Typo time to sniff the world.
[00:09:34.260]Many of you who are dog owners will know full well
[00:09:37.500]the weird sensation when you are trundling along
[00:09:40.170]with your pet and they just grind to a halt
[00:09:44.520]and start sniffing some piece of pavement or a plant
[00:09:48.720]or a bit of wall that looks completely non-descript
[00:09:51.090]to your eyes but it's clearly bursting with information
[00:09:55.530]to your dog's nose.
[00:09:57.630]That nose is really special in its structure in ways
[00:10:01.410]that we might not appreciate.
[00:10:03.330]You'll note that a dog's nose has nostrils that curve
[00:10:06.480]to the side these apostrophe shapes.
[00:10:09.960]When a dog exhales as it is sniffing
[00:10:14.460]the air from those nostrils does not as you might expect,
[00:10:18.390]blow away all of the scent accumulated on that surface.
[00:10:22.890]Instead, the shape
[00:10:24.540]of those nostrils create swirling vortices of air
[00:10:28.110]that sweep those scented molecules into the dog's nose
[00:10:31.920]even when it is blowing out.
[00:10:34.260]So inhale or exhale,
[00:10:36.480]the dog is getting a constant conveyor belt
[00:10:38.790]of scent into its nose
[00:10:41.670]and inside that airstream splits into two,
[00:10:47.610]so one large river goes down into the lungs
[00:10:50.640]and is for breathing much as what happens in our nose,
[00:10:54.120]but a small tributary goes into a chamber at the back
[00:10:57.240]of the snout that is for smell and for smell alone
[00:11:01.470]and that chamber is not easily voided
[00:11:03.210]when the dogs breathe out.
[00:11:04.650]So again, its sense of smell is continuous and smooth,
[00:11:10.110]not flickering and stroboscopic as mine is.
[00:11:15.630]Also, dogs use this hardware just
[00:11:18.870]to a much greater degree than we humans do.
[00:11:21.630]Like I said with Typo, he always sniffs things around him.
[00:11:26.700]It's his main way of interacting with
[00:11:28.620]and exploring the world
[00:11:30.060]just as looking around
[00:11:31.950]and gazing across the scene is for me.
[00:11:35.850]When I watch him doing this with some random plant,
[00:11:39.930]why that plant and not that one?
[00:11:41.700]Why this piece of sidewalk and not that one?
[00:11:44.130]I'm reminded that even though
[00:11:45.480]we are standing next to each other,
[00:11:47.760]we are experiencing our shared physical reality
[00:11:51.205]in utterly different ways.
[00:11:53.400]We are each of us trapped in our own sensory bubble
[00:11:58.500]and there is a beautiful word for that bubble.
[00:12:02.070]That word is Umwelt.
[00:12:04.920]This is simply German for environment,
[00:12:08.190]but it does not just mean the physical
[00:12:10.200]environment around us.
[00:12:11.490]My umwelt is not this podium,
[00:12:14.490]it's not the stage beneath my feet.
[00:12:17.130]My umwelt is the particular cocktail of sights
[00:12:20.709]and smells and sounds
[00:12:23.550]and textures that I have access to
[00:12:27.150]and that's going to be very different
[00:12:28.860]than the cocktail the Typo has access to
[00:12:32.049]or that any other animal
[00:12:33.600]or indeed any other individual can detect.
[00:12:37.320]We each of us are only sensing a tiny sliver
[00:12:42.480]of the fullness of reality
[00:12:44.670]and each of us is getting a slightly different one
[00:12:47.940]of those slivers.
[00:12:50.040]This concept to me is one of the most beautiful
[00:12:53.040]and wonderful in all of biology.
[00:12:56.010]First it's very humbling.
[00:12:58.410]It tells us that for all of our vaunted human intelligence
[00:13:01.440]and our technology,
[00:13:02.640]we really are only capturing a tiny fraction
[00:13:05.880]of what there is to perceive.
[00:13:08.490]It doesn't feel that way, right?
[00:13:09.690]You are sitting there and you are not aware
[00:13:12.330]of gaps in your perception.
[00:13:13.950]It feels like your understanding of the world is complete,
[00:13:18.990]but that is an illusion
[00:13:20.820]and it is an illusion that all living things share,
[00:13:25.140]all animals at least share.
[00:13:27.240]For that same reason,
[00:13:28.710]the umwelt concept is I think very, very expansive.
[00:13:32.790]It tells us that everywhere we go,
[00:13:35.820]even in the most familiar of places,
[00:13:38.400]there are new things to learn
[00:13:40.470]and discover that the magical always lurks
[00:13:43.830]around the corner from the mundane
[00:13:45.690]that the extraordinary is always simmering
[00:13:48.750]behind the ordinary.
[00:13:50.940]The umwelt idea tells us that there is
[00:13:53.340]so much about our world to discover
[00:13:55.620]and one way of discovering it is by thinking about
[00:13:58.290]what other animals are experiencing.
[00:14:01.590]And so here now is a quick whirlwind tour
[00:14:05.070]through the animal kingdom
[00:14:06.180]and the kinds of things that they can perceive
[00:14:08.373]that we cannot.
[00:14:11.370]Many creatures like the sea turtle on the left
[00:14:14.370]and this Eurasian robin on the right
[00:14:16.770]can detect the magnetic field of the Earth itself.
[00:14:21.060]They do something
[00:14:22.440]that I can only accomplish using technology,
[00:14:24.840]using compasses, using the app on my phone.
[00:14:27.750]They have living compasses built into their bodies
[00:14:31.800]and they use this to guide their way
[00:14:33.660]on long epic migrations.
[00:14:36.360]Sea turtle that hatches off the coast
[00:14:38.640]of Florida will head into the Atlantic
[00:14:41.280]and then do a clockwise circuit
[00:14:43.530]of the entire ocean over the span of a decade.
[00:14:46.560]If you take that hatchling turtle and put it in a lab
[00:14:49.680]and expose it to the kinds
[00:14:51.270]of different magnetic fields it would experience
[00:14:53.460]at different point along that journey,
[00:14:55.740]it will orient in the right direction
[00:14:58.140]as if it was say off the coast of Portugal
[00:15:00.870]and not off the coast of Florida.
[00:15:02.327]And it will do that even if
[00:15:03.870]it has never been in the water before.
[00:15:07.080]The songbird, if you put it in a cage in a dark room
[00:15:11.760]when it comes time to migrate,
[00:15:13.710]even though it can't see any other landmarks,
[00:15:16.590]it will still know exactly which way to go
[00:15:19.305]and try and head in that direction.
[00:15:22.620]Before coming here,
[00:15:23.550]I just came from a long trip to New Zealand
[00:15:26.250]and reporting for my next book
[00:15:28.007]looking at a bird called the Bar-tailed godwit,
[00:15:31.230]which every year migrates between Alaska
[00:15:33.930]and New Zealand on a nonstop flight.
[00:15:37.290]Every year the adults leave first
[00:15:41.430]and so the youngsters who've been alive
[00:15:43.800]for all of three and a half months
[00:15:45.690]and have never heard of New Zealand
[00:15:49.110]much less know how to get there,
[00:15:52.230]somehow fly straight across the Pacific nonstop
[00:15:56.880]without food, water or sleep
[00:15:58.890]and arrive in the right place.
[00:16:01.260]A testament to how incredible
[00:16:03.240]the navigational skills of animals can be.
[00:16:07.800]This animal is equally impressive but perhaps less welcome.
[00:16:11.310]This is a rattlesnake.
[00:16:12.840]You can see two nostrils on the front of its snout,
[00:16:15.570]but also two other holes which are called pits.
[00:16:20.580]Those detect the infrared radiation given off
[00:16:24.240]by warm blooded prey, the heat of things like mice and rats.
[00:16:29.580]If we were to turn off all the lights in this auditorium,
[00:16:32.730]you might be very faintly aware of the body heat
[00:16:36.030]of the people sitting next to you,
[00:16:37.950]but certainly not enough to tell anything about them
[00:16:40.466]or to be able to find them in the darkness.
[00:16:43.710]This rattlesnake, however, if it was sitting on my head,
[00:16:46.530]would be able to detect the heat
[00:16:48.270]of a mouse at my fingertip well enough to strike and kill it
[00:16:53.430]and the nerves that go from the pit organs
[00:16:55.650]eventually mingle and meet
[00:16:57.060]with those coming from the snake's eyes
[00:16:59.220]in a way that makes some scientists think
[00:17:01.020]that the snake effectively sees in heat.
[00:17:03.330]That heat is just another color to it,
[00:17:05.730]like many of the normal ones that we can see.
[00:17:08.820]Many incredible senses have evolved to function in the dark
[00:17:13.410]to allow their owners to operate in environments
[00:17:16.674]where vision is of limited use.
[00:17:19.980]This is a star-nosed mole.
[00:17:22.170]This animal is very common
[00:17:23.520]throughout the eastern United States,
[00:17:25.500]but very few people actually ever see it
[00:17:27.870]because it spent most of its life
[00:17:30.097]in dark subterranean tunnels.
[00:17:33.180]It feels its way around the tunnels
[00:17:35.280]with that extraordinary structure on the end of its snout,
[00:17:38.400]which looks like this animal has just run into a sea anemone
[00:17:41.220]and got stuck or perhaps like it has two hands
[00:17:45.870]on the front of its face reaching out to the world
[00:17:48.360]that is more or less what the star is.
[00:17:51.390]It is one of the natural world's
[00:17:52.860]most incredible organs of touch.
[00:17:55.440]With it, the mole runs through its tunnel
[00:17:57.277]pressing against the walls
[00:17:59.451]and discerning the texture of a juicy earthworm
[00:18:03.090]against that of the surrounding soil.
[00:18:05.430]The star-nose mole can press its star on its tunnel,
[00:18:08.696]detect an earthworm, eat that earthworm,
[00:18:11.948]and move over to press it star somewhere else
[00:18:14.760]in about a quarter of a second,
[00:18:16.830]which is how long it takes you to blink.
[00:18:20.310]Many incredible senses in the animal kingdom do combine
[00:18:23.820]these weird abilities with blinding speed.
[00:18:28.350]So bats for example, many of them produce
[00:18:32.580]high pitched calls too high in frequency for us to hear
[00:18:36.780]ultrasonic calls
[00:18:38.700]and then listen for the echo.
[00:18:41.490]So those calls make
[00:18:42.600]as they rebound off objects in the bat's environment
[00:18:45.720]and by precisely timing the delay
[00:18:50.550]between the call going out
[00:18:52.260]and the echo coming back the bat can work out
[00:18:55.080]how far away it is from say the wall of a cave
[00:18:58.714]or a moth flying through the air.
[00:19:01.740]Bats might make up to 200 of these calls every second
[00:19:06.810]and they have such incredible control
[00:19:09.271]that they will release the next call only when the echo
[00:19:13.350]from the previous one has come back.
[00:19:16.140]200 times a second.
[00:19:18.690]In air, this skill called echo location
[00:19:21.750]has one big limitation which is distance.
[00:19:25.920]These calls lose a lot of energy as they go out
[00:19:28.350]and then more as they make the return journey.
[00:19:30.570]And so a bat say standing maybe
[00:19:34.080]in the middle of the stage might only be able
[00:19:36.210]to echo locate on a moth roughly where the podium is.
[00:19:40.050]Underwater, it's a different story.
[00:19:42.180]Sound travels further and much faster
[00:19:45.480]and so animals that can echo locate in the water
[00:19:48.240]like this dolphin can perceive over distances
[00:19:52.380]of maybe half a mile or so.
[00:19:55.350]They can also do something really incredible.
[00:19:57.436]Underwater dolphin's ultrasonic calls
[00:20:02.430]move very well through flesh
[00:20:04.740]which has the same density as water
[00:20:07.110]but tend to rebound off objects
[00:20:08.940]with either a much higher or lower density
[00:20:11.250]so things like bone or lungs.
[00:20:14.970]So this dolphin echo locating
[00:20:17.070]on the snorkels can likely perceive their skeletons,
[00:20:21.360]their lungs, it can peer into their bodies
[00:20:24.480]as if it was a living medical scanner.
[00:20:28.740]Dolphins can also do incredible things like detect
[00:20:31.200]land mines buried under the sea floor,
[00:20:33.900]which is something that no military sonar
[00:20:35.610]has ever been able to achieve.
[00:20:38.880]Other sensors become possible in the water
[00:20:40.800]in the way that they aren't on land.
[00:20:43.680]This is a black ghost knife fish.
[00:20:47.640]This is found in the Amazon
[00:20:48.960]and it is one of many hundreds of kinds of fish
[00:20:51.930]that can produce their own electricity.
[00:20:54.600]They produce their own electric fields,
[00:20:56.760]not strongly enough to stun
[00:20:58.680]or kill like the electric eel can,
[00:21:01.407]but enough to allow the fish
[00:21:03.420]to navigate through its surroundings.
[00:21:05.970]What it's looking out for,
[00:21:07.800]what it's feeling for I guess are
[00:21:10.290]how those fields are distorted by the objects around them
[00:21:14.670]like the insulating rocks in this picture
[00:21:17.640]or the conductive plants.
[00:21:20.130]In this way, this fish has a kind
[00:21:22.590]of omnidirectional awareness
[00:21:24.360]of its entire surroundings even when it can't see anything,
[00:21:27.330]even when it's in water that's too cloudy to see anything in
[00:21:31.589]and it can also use electric fields
[00:21:34.105]to communicate with its own kind.
[00:21:37.200]If you take an electrode that's centered for those fields
[00:21:42.180]and connect it to a speaker
[00:21:43.890]and then lower that into rivers
[00:21:45.870]in various parts of the world in Africa and South America,
[00:21:49.260]you will hear this buzzing electric chorus,
[00:21:52.410]this chatty noise of loads of fish talking
[00:21:55.050]to each other in ways that we would
[00:21:56.820]otherwise be unable to detect.
[00:21:59.880]Finally the water also teems
[00:22:01.950]with other signals that we have no hope
[00:22:03.420]of hearing of detecting.
[00:22:06.400]If a fish swims through a body of water,
[00:22:10.200]it leaves behind tracks.
[00:22:12.810]That seems weird, right?
[00:22:14.070]Water doesn't seem like something that would hold a track,
[00:22:16.770]but a swimming fish does create swirling currents of water
[00:22:19.920]that persist for maybe a minute after it is gone.
[00:22:24.000]You cannot feel that, right,
[00:22:25.590]if you put your hand into the water
[00:22:27.750]behind the swimming fish,
[00:22:28.950]you will not be able to detect the trails that it has left.
[00:22:32.790]You need better hardware like this.
[00:22:36.190]This is a harbor seal.
[00:22:38.700]This particular harbor seal is named Sprouts
[00:22:43.170]and just look at this beautiful array
[00:22:47.760]of whiskers around his face.
[00:22:50.370]These whiskers are what allows Sprouts
[00:22:52.950]to detect the wakes left behind by swimming fish.
[00:22:56.760]I went to see the so seal in Santa Cruz
[00:22:58.890]and the scientists who work with Sprouts do this little demo
[00:23:02.010]where they have a long pole
[00:23:03.360]with a tennis ball at the end of it,
[00:23:05.220]they put it in the water, in the seal's tank,
[00:23:07.920]move it in out left and right, up and down
[00:23:10.770]and then the queue Sprouts
[00:23:12.090]who you'll note is blindfolded to follow the ball,
[00:23:15.960]which he did and I don't just mean
[00:23:17.790]like he knows it's kind of roughly over there.
[00:23:20.400]So he's swimming over there.
[00:23:21.690]I mean that he moved up and down and left and right
[00:23:25.590]and in and out precisely following the path of the ball
[00:23:29.280]as if the two of them were connected by an invisible rope.
[00:23:34.260]These abilities can seem supernatural,
[00:23:39.145]they're extraordinary,
[00:23:42.120]but I don't ever in book talk
[00:23:46.710]about super senses and I don't
[00:23:50.100]because they all come with limitations.
[00:23:53.700]So the turtle's magnetic sense works
[00:23:56.700]really well over continental and oceanic distances
[00:24:00.150]but is very noisy over shorter distances.
[00:24:03.660]The snake's infrared sense is very fuzzy and low resolution.
[00:24:08.220]It doesn't have the crisp visual detail
[00:24:10.920]of our thermal cameras.
[00:24:12.870]As I've said, the bats echolocation only works
[00:24:16.620]at short range.
[00:24:18.810]So all of these incredible sensors have drawbacks.
[00:24:22.740]Every creature perceives some things
[00:24:25.171]and not others, us included.
[00:24:28.350]And so "Immense World" is not a book about super senses.
[00:24:31.710]It's not a book that says animals are only worthy
[00:24:35.130]of our time and attention
[00:24:36.720]when their abilities exceed our own.
[00:24:39.540]It is a book not about superiority but about diversity.
[00:24:44.100]Its argument is that animals are worth our time
[00:24:46.830]and consideration because their lives
[00:24:49.710]and their experiences differ from ours.
[00:24:52.980]Full stop.
[00:24:54.360]And because that variety is compelling in
[00:24:56.880]and of itself and because it teaches us important lessons
[00:24:59.503]about the world around us,
[00:25:01.710]that is the case even when those abilities
[00:25:04.890]might seem inferior to ours.
[00:25:09.270]What are these? They are scallops.
[00:25:12.180]How many people here have seen like a live scallop?
[00:25:15.990]Okay, not very many.
[00:25:18.810]A scallop is basically just a very fancy clam
[00:25:21.786]in a beautiful fan shaped shell.
[00:25:26.820]This sauteed puck
[00:25:28.650]of garlic flavored deliciousness is the major muscle
[00:25:32.610]of the animal within that shell.
[00:25:35.040]The shell can open and close
[00:25:36.330]so the scallop can swim like this weird panicked castanet
[00:25:39.930]and on the rim of the shell there are eyes,
[00:25:46.050]dozens of eyes in some species,
[00:25:48.270]hundreds of eyes in others.
[00:25:50.550]They can be really beautiful. This is a bay scallop.
[00:25:53.010]These eyes have this kind of neon blueberry vibe to them.
[00:25:59.100]With so many eyes you might assume
[00:26:01.770]that a scallop has a beautiful wraparound image
[00:26:04.860]of its world.
[00:26:05.693]A scallop sitting on the stage
[00:26:06.960]will able to see all of you
[00:26:11.040]and yet that may not be true.
[00:26:14.190]Each eye is actually pretty good.
[00:26:16.080]It's got decent optics.
[00:26:17.370]It's a pretty, pretty good camera,
[00:26:21.900]but the brain that all of those eyes connect
[00:26:24.000]to is incredibly simple
[00:26:26.580]and probably too simple,
[00:26:28.350]too little processing power
[00:26:30.930]to integrate all of the images from those eyes.
[00:26:35.400]So one of the researchers who study scallops suggested to me
[00:26:38.460]that maybe this animal isn't actually combining
[00:26:43.050]information from its eyes.
[00:26:44.340]Maybe each eye is simply a motion detector
[00:26:46.980]or like an interest detector.
[00:26:49.230]It tells the scallop there is something here
[00:26:52.950]that is worth investigating,
[00:26:54.630]which it then does with other sensors
[00:26:56.340]like smell and touch
[00:26:58.980]which is what these tentacles are for.
[00:27:01.770]So perhaps this animal sees without scenes, right?
[00:27:08.310]So it doesn't have a movie playing out in its head
[00:27:12.330]of the visual world like we do.
[00:27:15.142]That is really, really hard to imagine
[00:27:18.570]because that movie that tableau,
[00:27:20.940]that scene is synonymous with vision for us.
[00:27:24.540]It is how we experience the world through our eyes.
[00:27:28.860]The scallop reminds us that even for vision, the sense that
[00:27:33.750]for those of us who awfully cited is dominant,
[00:27:37.920]there are still surprises
[00:27:39.570]to be found throughout the animal kingdom.
[00:27:42.900]You have two eyes, they're on your head
[00:27:47.310]and they face forward
[00:27:49.350]and I regret to inform you that that's really weird.
[00:27:53.700]For an animal that is really strange,
[00:27:56.970]most creatures have a different setup
[00:28:01.080]in at least one crucial way
[00:28:02.903]and that can really radically change
[00:28:06.240]your visual experience of the world.
[00:28:07.650]So many birds have eyes on the sides of their heads
[00:28:11.484]which give them a wraparound view of the world.
[00:28:15.150]That doesn't seem like a massively huge difference
[00:28:17.610]than our visual experience, which is forward.
[00:28:22.500]But it is like my visual world,
[00:28:25.110]your visual world is in front of you
[00:28:26.730]and you walk forward, it comes towards you.
[00:28:29.130]A bird's visual world surrounds it
[00:28:31.860]and so when it is walking forward,
[00:28:33.300]it is coming towards it
[00:28:34.200]and away from it at the same time again,
[00:28:36.300]like try and sit with that
[00:28:37.646]and imagine that it's quite hard.
[00:28:40.530]Many ducks have eyes not only on the sides of the heads
[00:28:43.110]but shifted up a little bit.
[00:28:46.140]So this black scoter or a mallard
[00:28:49.200]sitting on a lake can see the entirety
[00:28:51.780]of the sky without needing to turn their heads.
[00:28:56.100]In fact, turning your head, which is a thing
[00:28:59.190]that many humans equate with intelligence, right?
[00:29:01.560]This active eyes, active mind is really a thing
[00:29:04.860]that you only need to do
[00:29:06.330]if you have our kind of forward facing eyes.
[00:29:09.750]If you have eyes that can see the whole of the world,
[00:29:11.610]you don't need to turn
[00:29:13.050]and so you have to look for different signs
[00:29:14.850]of intellect in those kinds of creatures.
[00:29:17.460]Some other animals do in fact shift their gaze
[00:29:19.800]including really surprising ones like this jumping spider.
[00:29:25.170]I see of you disgusted gasps in the audience,
[00:29:30.030]I happen to think this animal is extraordinarily cute.
[00:29:33.180]Look at the gigantic,
[00:29:34.350]enormous centralized they look looks like a baby.
[00:29:36.390]It's adorable.
[00:29:43.331]So this animal has four pairs of eyes.
[00:29:46.890]You can see two in the image.
[00:29:49.410]The two central eyes do more or less what your eyes do.
[00:29:53.250]They see in color and in crisp detail,
[00:29:56.280]but the eyes on the side,
[00:29:57.790]so which are smaller detect movement.
[00:30:01.830]Now if you block those two side-eye,
[00:30:04.770]even if the front really big ones are unencumbered,
[00:30:07.680]the spider can no longer track
[00:30:09.540]moving objects in front of it,
[00:30:11.610]which again is really strange.
[00:30:13.170]Here's an animal that has done division of labor with vision
[00:30:16.590]that has taken the kinds of tasks we do
[00:30:18.840]with one pair of eyes
[00:30:19.890]because you only got one pair of eyes you weirdos
[00:30:25.110]and distributed them among its multiple pair of eyes.
[00:30:30.480]Our one pair of eyes can do one thing very, very well
[00:30:35.190]and much better than most other creatures,
[00:30:36.840]which is see in high resolution, I mean like not my eyes,
[00:30:41.280]I have like minus six and minus seven contact lenses.
[00:30:43.500]But like in general, like theoretically
[00:30:45.570]humans can see very sharply much more so
[00:30:49.020]than almost any other animals except for birds of prey
[00:30:51.780]like eagles and hawks and so on.
[00:30:54.433]And that means that our view of the world is quite singular.
[00:30:59.490]So this butterfly on the left looking at other butterflies
[00:31:04.170]of its own kind would not be able
[00:31:05.940]to see this intricate pattern of spots and blotches
[00:31:09.720]and stripes.
[00:31:10.670]It would just see an orange and brown blur.
[00:31:13.260]Those patterns are therefore much sharper animals
[00:31:16.290]like the birds that might eat this insect.
[00:31:19.950]Zebras are famously black and white stripe
[00:31:22.500]and there has long been this idea that those act
[00:31:26.520]as some kind of camouflage that they are distracting
[00:31:30.300]or confusing to the zebra's predators like lions
[00:31:34.440]and hyenas, which would make perfect sense
[00:31:37.320]except those animals can't make out those stripes.
[00:31:41.340]A lion would have to be extremely close to zebra
[00:31:44.160]to tell the black and white apart.
[00:31:46.560]At most distances that matter,
[00:31:48.630]a zebra just looks like a donkey to a lion.
[00:31:52.110]You can ask me in the Q&A why zebras have stripes.
[00:31:58.050]The price we pay for having very high resolution eyes is
[00:32:02.760]that they don't work very well in the darkness.
[00:32:07.200]So an eye can either have high resolution
[00:32:10.650]or high sensitivity
[00:32:12.540]and it cannot have both at the same time.
[00:32:14.850]There are physical limitations that means you have
[00:32:17.330]to do one or the other.
[00:32:19.260]So we have gone for the former root high resolution.
[00:32:22.680]Other animals do high sensitivity and this is one of them.
[00:32:26.640]This is a giant squid.
[00:32:28.350]This is the owner of the largest eye in the animal kingdom.
[00:32:31.110]Its eyes are the size of soccer balls
[00:32:34.740]and the next biggest eyes in the animal kingdom,
[00:32:36.900]those of like giant whales and swordfish can fit
[00:32:39.870]inside the pupil of a giant squid's eye.
[00:32:43.380]So not only are the eyes big,
[00:32:45.630]but they are like preposterously big.
[00:32:48.540]They are so much bigger than the next biggest thing
[00:32:51.510]which begs the question why.
[00:32:53.896]There is one kind of thing
[00:32:56.130]that these eyes are exceptionally good at seeing
[00:32:59.400]and so much better than an eye
[00:33:00.750]that would be slightly smaller.
[00:33:02.730]That's a large field of light,
[00:33:06.270]distributed sparse light in dark places.
[00:33:10.140]Giant squid lives in the deep ocean.
[00:33:11.910]Its major predator is the sperm whale.
[00:33:14.520]Sperm whales do not glow,
[00:33:17.370]but they swim through water
[00:33:19.620]that is full of glowing creatures
[00:33:21.390]and as they do, they cause those bioluminescent animals
[00:33:25.440]and organisms to produce little flashes of light.
[00:33:28.740]And so the largest eyes in the animal kingdom perhaps evolve
[00:33:32.880]to detect the twinkling outlines of charging whales.
[00:33:37.980]Now that occurs in a very alien place
[00:33:44.040]that you and I will not witness.
[00:33:47.310]I mean I won't, you might,
[00:33:49.170]I don't want to crush your dreams.
[00:33:50.752]You should have a go.
[00:33:54.420]But even in more everyday settings,
[00:33:58.110]the differences between what we see
[00:34:00.510]and what even very familiar animals see can be vast.
[00:34:05.130]Let's bring Typo back to the chat.
[00:34:08.640]Here he is with some of his favorite toys,
[00:34:10.530]looking really confused about why he's not being allowed
[00:34:12.570]to play with them just yet.
[00:34:15.180]On the left is what I see when I look at this scene.
[00:34:19.560]Unless you are colorblind in some way,
[00:34:22.230]that's probably what you see too.
[00:34:24.030]On the right is what Typo sees.
[00:34:27.391]It is a myth that dogs cannot see in color.
[00:34:31.500]They absolutely can.
[00:34:32.880]It's just a much more limited range of colors.
[00:34:35.010]It's blues and yellows.
[00:34:36.330]You can see that this red toy is like a kind
[00:34:39.660]of dirty mustardy yellow,
[00:34:42.990]the same goes for violets and greens.
[00:34:46.350]This is because Typo's eyes have two kinds
[00:34:49.140]of color sensing cells in them cones and mine have three.
[00:34:53.730]So he's a dichromat.
[00:34:55.270]I'm a trichromat
[00:34:57.480]and that means that I have access
[00:34:59.400]to maybe a hundred times more colors
[00:35:01.500]than he can discriminate.
[00:35:03.210]I have, it's helpful to think of like
[00:35:06.450]an entire dimension of vision
[00:35:08.580]and sorry, dimension of colors
[00:35:10.680]that I can perceive and that he cannot.
[00:35:14.490]But there are colors that even I can't see
[00:35:16.587]and that humans in general cannot see.
[00:35:19.680]One of them is ultraviolet.
[00:35:21.510]This is a color that exists just
[00:35:22.890]beyond the violet end of the rainbow.
[00:35:25.200]And in fact, most animals
[00:35:26.970]that can see color can see ultraviolet again,
[00:35:30.750]we're quite weird in our inability to do that.
[00:35:33.784]And when you can't see ultraviolet you a lot of the signals
[00:35:38.820]and patterns in nature, this flower is a black-eyed Susan
[00:35:43.560]and on the left is what it looks like to us,
[00:35:45.360]which is just yellow.
[00:35:47.880]On the right is what it looks like to a bird or a bee
[00:35:50.749]or any of the things that can see UV.
[00:35:54.600]You can see this beautiful halo shape
[00:35:56.670]in the middle of the flower.
[00:35:58.380]Many flowers have this halos, bullseye,
[00:36:01.830]landing strips, patterns that are visible
[00:36:04.980]to their ultraviolet sighted pollinators.
[00:36:08.520]Sunflowers have this.
[00:36:09.570]The sunflowers not just yellow,
[00:36:11.190]it also has vivid UV markings to it.
[00:36:16.170]Like I said, many animals can see ultraviolet.
[00:36:19.980]All birds have this ability
[00:36:21.950]and they also have a fourth kind of cone cell in their eyes,
[00:36:27.690]so they're tetrachromat, which means that they,
[00:36:31.800]while I can see a hundred times more colors
[00:36:33.660]than Typo can see, any of the birds around us,
[00:36:36.720]the pigeons that inhabit our city
[00:36:40.140]can see a hundred times more colors again.
[00:36:42.480]So their lives are a riot of colors
[00:36:45.153]that we can scarcely imagine.
[00:36:47.640]This is a lilac breasted roller
[00:36:49.860]that I photographed in Kenya, which I guess is a fair name,
[00:36:52.740]but it's also like a lilac breasted, cyan belly,
[00:36:55.759]coco back, red cheeked, white browed,
[00:36:59.993]green topped roller.
[00:37:02.550]I don't name the birds.
[00:37:05.490]As already impressive and resplendent as this bird is
[00:37:11.400]like this is just a fraction of the colors
[00:37:13.233]that the bird itself is seeing.
[00:37:17.130]You'll notice that I have not shown you an image of
[00:37:19.920]what a lilac breasted roller looks like
[00:37:22.140]to another lilac breasted roller because I can't, right?
[00:37:26.160]I cannot do that substitution
[00:37:28.440]with all the colors you can see into the ones
[00:37:30.330]that we can see because four into three doesn't go.
[00:37:34.530]And this is the ultimate omnipresent problem
[00:37:40.620]when thinking about the umwelt of other animals.
[00:37:44.160]You simply cannot fully appreciate
[00:37:47.580]what their experiences are like.
[00:37:49.290]Whether you are talking about the television of a bird
[00:37:51.840]or the seamless sight of a scallop
[00:37:56.850]or even just the experience of a duck,
[00:37:59.400]seeing the entirety of the sky above it
[00:38:01.710]without needing to turn.
[00:38:03.900]There is always this chasm,
[00:38:06.030]this gulf between your subjective experience of the world
[00:38:09.630]and that of another animal.
[00:38:11.280]And it always exists.
[00:38:12.900]Science can take us close to the edge of that gulf.
[00:38:15.540]Technology can help us to bridge it a little bit.
[00:38:18.030]Good writing I would hope can take us
[00:38:20.340]a little bit further across, but it always exists.
[00:38:25.140]The philosopher Thomas Nagel
[00:38:26.550]wrote about this really beautifully in his essay,
[00:38:28.627]"What is it Like to be a Bat"
[00:38:30.600]where he argued that you could very easily imagine flying
[00:38:33.870]through the air on leathery wings
[00:38:35.880]and having insects in your mouth,
[00:38:37.620]but you could not ever fully appreciate
[00:38:39.870]what it is like to echolocate, to see the world,
[00:38:42.750]to perceive the world through echoes.
[00:38:45.930]This turns out was a great example
[00:38:47.820]for Nagel to have chosen
[00:38:48.930]because some blind people can echolocate.
[00:38:53.820]I write about one of them and I met one of them in the book.
[00:38:58.020]His name is Daniel Kish.
[00:39:00.210]He's been blind since close to birth
[00:39:02.490]and he makes loud clicking noises
[00:39:04.740]with his tongue actually louder
[00:39:06.540]than I can even do with my fingers.
[00:39:08.640]And through that he finds his way through the world.
[00:39:12.120]I've been on walks with Daniel where he can tell me like,
[00:39:14.340]oh, we're passing a car, a shrub.
[00:39:16.830]There's a branch that I need to duck under. There's a fence.
[00:39:20.010]It's slatted.
[00:39:21.000]This one is chain link, right?
[00:39:22.230]He has a really, really advanced awareness
[00:39:24.720]of the world through echolocation.
[00:39:26.790]Now, you might think then that we are both humans.
[00:39:30.540]We both speak English
[00:39:31.620]and so he can use our greatest of technologies language
[00:39:35.730]to tell me about what he's experiencing in a way
[00:39:37.710]that finally crosses that chasm.
[00:39:39.810]And yet Daniel has been blind since close to birth
[00:39:43.440]and he's grown up in a culture full of sighted people
[00:39:46.500]with a language full of sighted terms.
[00:39:49.440]And so when he uses those terms to describe his experience,
[00:39:52.590]when he uses words like brightness and flash,
[00:39:56.670]I still don't know whether he's describing
[00:39:59.010]what I mean when I hear those terms.
[00:40:02.250]When he uses them to describe what it feels like to him
[00:40:05.790]to echolocate through the world,
[00:40:08.070]even though we have a common language,
[00:40:10.355]the chasm still remains
[00:40:13.200]and that poses some difficulty to an author
[00:40:17.130]who is trying to get readers
[00:40:18.810]to think about the umwelt idea.
[00:40:21.060]I'm telling you that you should try
[00:40:23.070]and think about the sensory world
[00:40:24.780]of other animals while also telling you it can't be done
[00:40:30.390]or at least not fully.
[00:40:32.640]I'm also telling you that the attempt is worth it,
[00:40:36.480]that there is glory and purpose in the striving.
[00:40:40.770]Because doing this changes our understanding about
[00:40:44.610]so much of the world.
[00:40:46.920]It changes our understanding of the animals themselves.
[00:40:49.320]Sometimes helpfully, dispelling stereotypes
[00:40:52.200]that we have about them.
[00:40:54.690]This is a crocodile.
[00:40:55.950]It just looks like an armored thug.
[00:40:58.770]It looks insensitive and brutish,
[00:41:02.610]but along its jawline there are tiny little bumps
[00:41:06.570]that are among the most sensitive organs
[00:41:08.730]of touch in the animal kingdom.
[00:41:10.890]So sensitive that they can detect the faint ripples
[00:41:13.560]of prey drinking at the water's edge
[00:41:15.840]or maybe the tiny movements that the babies are making
[00:41:18.900]inside their eggs before they hatch.
[00:41:21.420]This animal is not a brutish tank,
[00:41:24.330]it is actually a paragon of delicacy and sensitivity.
[00:41:29.970]Rats and mice have been part of our lives
[00:41:31.920]for the longest time,
[00:41:33.120]whether as pets or lab animals or household pests.
[00:41:38.310]But for all of that time, almost all of it,
[00:41:42.120]we just haven't had any idea about
[00:41:44.040]how communicative they are.
[00:41:46.637]Beyond the squeaks that we can hear,
[00:41:48.270]there are also so many ultrasonic ones that we cannot.
[00:41:53.400]Rats and mice will duet to each other during courtship,
[00:41:56.850]singing ultrasonic songs.
[00:41:58.920]If you tickle a rat, it will giggle ultrasonically.
[00:42:03.660]So here are animals that we know very, very well
[00:42:06.330]and who and for whom a large part
[00:42:09.000]of their lives was just a complete mystery to us.
[00:42:12.480]Thinking about the umwelt idea
[00:42:13.860]also changes our understanding
[00:42:15.540]about and parts of the world
[00:42:17.370]that we really take for granted.
[00:42:20.130]What color is darkness?
[00:42:23.190]It's black, right?
[00:42:24.750]Darkness is the absence of color.
[00:42:26.640]Like go outside after the sunset the world will look black.
[00:42:30.270]But that's only the case
[00:42:31.230]because our eyes are not very sensitive at night.
[00:42:33.780]This animal's eyes very much are.
[00:42:36.003]This is a beautiful elephant hawk moth
[00:42:38.765]and its eyes are so sensitive that in conditions
[00:42:42.930]where you would not be able to see your hand
[00:42:45.510]in front of your face, it can tell the colors
[00:42:48.690]of different flowers apart well enough to choose
[00:42:52.260]which ones to drink from.
[00:42:54.780]This animal is a reminder
[00:42:56.130]that the dark is black to us,
[00:43:00.090]but it's actually bursting
[00:43:01.560]with all the usual colors of a floral meadow
[00:43:04.500]if you have the right kind of eyes.
[00:43:07.830]Is ice cold?
[00:43:11.550]You are right to be skeptical about my question.
[00:43:15.240]Or perhaps you think I've gone insane.
[00:43:18.420]Ice is frozen.
[00:43:20.850]That is an objective property of matter that doesn't change.
[00:43:25.230]But whether ice is cold depends on the biology
[00:43:30.540]of the animal that is touching it.
[00:43:33.330]It depends on their temperature sensors,
[00:43:36.090]which temperatures those sensors are calibrated to.
[00:43:39.780]For some animals, things that we would feel are hot
[00:43:42.150]and cold are nothing of the sort.
[00:43:44.850]And for others, painful, cold.
[00:43:47.790]The kind of cold that we feel
[00:43:49.260]when we touch ice for too long
[00:43:51.060]just doesn't exist.
[00:43:53.490]They don't have the apparatus for sensing that.
[00:43:56.430]And so when you look at animals suffering
[00:43:58.710]through harsh environmental climates, like think about,
[00:44:01.890]I dunno, penguins in Antarctica
[00:44:03.360]or cod in a frozen lake, you know,
[00:44:06.725]one always thinks that they are suffering
[00:44:11.040]through that horrible experience,
[00:44:12.930]but they probably experience it
[00:44:14.340]in a very, very, very different way.
[00:44:20.250]Thinking about the umwelt concept also forces us
[00:44:24.030]to think about the environment around us in new ways.
[00:44:27.678]I've already suggested that when I go for walks with Typo,
[00:44:30.960]I understand that my neighborhood is changing all the time.
[00:44:34.320]It's in constant flux. I can't perceive it to my eyes.
[00:44:38.100]Nothing is different.
[00:44:39.390]But to his nose, everything is different.
[00:44:42.330]New dogs have come by, they've peed on that wall.
[00:44:45.390]Those dogs have changed, right?
[00:44:47.010]They're eating something new.
[00:44:48.600]Maybe one of them isn't feeling very well.
[00:44:50.880]He can understand all of these things
[00:44:53.250]through his nose in a way that I miss.
[00:44:56.520]I know that the green spaces around me are full of signals
[00:45:01.170]that I can't perceive.
[00:45:02.520]Those are signals created by animals like this.
[00:45:05.370]This is a tree hopper.
[00:45:07.440]It's one of many tens of thousands of species of insects
[00:45:10.050]that live on the plants around us and drink their sap.
[00:45:13.860]These insects vibrate their abdomens to create signals
[00:45:18.270]that move along the stems and leaves
[00:45:20.460]and can be picked up by other tree hoppers sitting
[00:45:23.160]and standing on the same plant.
[00:45:24.780]This is how these insects communicate.
[00:45:28.020]These vibrational signals are not sounds
[00:45:31.740]as we typically understand them.
[00:45:33.600]If you put your ear right next to one of these insects,
[00:45:36.300]you won't hear anything,
[00:45:38.280]but you can convert their seismic signals into sounds
[00:45:42.630]with nothing more complicated
[00:45:43.830]than a clip on microphone and a speaker.
[00:45:46.920]And if you do that, if you go prospecting for insect sounds,
[00:45:51.690]as I did once with a scientist who studies free hoppers,
[00:45:56.400]what you will hear is not the simple
[00:45:59.910]chirping of a cricket.
[00:46:01.680]The kind of noise that you think an insect might make.
[00:46:04.728]What you will probably hear is something that's alien.
[00:46:08.520]That's something that sounds weird
[00:46:10.530]and haunting and ethereal,
[00:46:12.420]something that might sound more like birds
[00:46:14.629]or machinery or even musical instruments.
[00:46:19.530]And the idea that all the plants around us in parks,
[00:46:24.360]gardens, greenhouses are just thrumming
[00:46:28.080]with this bizarre alien chorus is astonishing to me.
[00:46:34.710]So is a great deeper understanding about
[00:46:37.860]the visual signals in those spaces.
[00:46:41.010]I've already talked about
[00:46:41.843]how some flowers have patterns that only insects
[00:46:45.300]and other UV sighted animals can see.
[00:46:49.260]And in fact, if you look at the diversity
[00:46:51.450]of colors in the flowers of the world
[00:46:54.390]and you try and work out theoretically what kind
[00:46:57.127]of eye is best at telling these colors apart,
[00:47:01.410]you basically get the eye of a bee.
[00:47:04.530]And you might think then that bees have evolved eyes
[00:47:09.150]that are really good at looking at flowers.
[00:47:12.300]And that idea would make total sense
[00:47:14.130]where it not for the fact that it's completely wrong.
[00:47:17.820]In fact, the eye that bees have came first
[00:47:23.700]and flowers evolved later.
[00:47:26.760]So flowers evolved colors
[00:47:29.550]that ideally tickle the eyes of bees.
[00:47:33.513]And I love that idea.
[00:47:36.630]I love it because it is very easy to think of the senses
[00:47:41.100]as passive things that you are sitting there,
[00:47:44.580]light is going into your eyes.
[00:47:46.950]My dulcet tones are going into your ears,
[00:47:49.950]smells maybe are going into your nose.
[00:47:53.190]You are not doing very much,
[00:47:55.230]but you are still sensing the world.
[00:47:57.270]And so it feels like sensing is just a thing
[00:47:59.520]that happens passively.
[00:48:03.330]But by sensing the world, you also change it.
[00:48:07.380]And the flowers and the bees remind us of that.
[00:48:10.287]Just because of the way a bee's eye was structured,
[00:48:14.850]just because of the particular wavelengths of light
[00:48:17.400]that it was sensitive to, that dictated the form
[00:48:21.150]that floral beauty takes across the planet.
[00:48:24.150]We often say the beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
[00:48:26.880]In fact, it arises because of that eye.
[00:48:31.950]The final thing I wanted to talk about
[00:48:33.630]and why I think the Umbel concept matters so much is
[00:48:37.200]that I think it clarifies our responsibilities
[00:48:41.250]to the natural world and to the harms that we force upon it.
[00:48:46.170]We are filling the darkness with light
[00:48:48.450]and the quiet with noise.
[00:48:50.760]These light and noise pollution
[00:48:52.950]respectively are big problems.
[00:48:57.000]They do not feel as viscerally bad as other forms
[00:49:01.170]of ecological harm like plastics on a beach
[00:49:04.320]or chemicals billowing from a smoke stack.
[00:49:07.216]But they are problems nonetheless.
[00:49:09.960]It feels weird to think of them though that way.
[00:49:12.120]Light is good.
[00:49:13.890]Light is synonymous with goodness,
[00:49:16.440]with safety, with knowledge.
[00:49:18.840]We want more light rather than less.
[00:49:21.210]We lit our way outta the dark ages
[00:49:24.676]and yet light in the wrong places
[00:49:27.330]and at the wrong times of day can be a pollutant.
[00:49:30.990]Just as all the other forms
[00:49:32.190]of pollution can be.
[00:49:33.750]Light at night,
[00:49:35.100]can distract migrating birds away
[00:49:37.020]from their journeys at a time
[00:49:39.062]when they can ill afford the energy of a detour.
[00:49:43.380]It can distract pollinating insects away
[00:49:45.240]from the plant they're meant to service.
[00:49:47.490]It can pull baby sea turtles away from the ocean
[00:49:50.430]and onto roads with predictably fatal results.
[00:49:53.970]And every year the proportion of the planet
[00:49:56.463]that is brighter gets bigger.
[00:49:59.910]And sorry, the proportion of the planet that is lit
[00:50:04.230]by light pollution at night gets brighter and bigger.
[00:50:09.030]Noise pollution is a similar problem.
[00:50:11.040]It drowns out the sounds that animals make to communicate
[00:50:15.420]with each other, the sounds that they need to listen to.
[00:50:18.030]The rustle of a predator, the rustle of prey,
[00:50:20.805]the alarm calls that their offspring might make.
[00:50:25.470]Noise pollution also can push animals away from habitats
[00:50:29.550]that would be ideal for them.
[00:50:32.100]There's one experiment that I wrote about in the book
[00:50:33.810]that showed this very well.
[00:50:35.910]These researchers strapped speakers in a protected bit
[00:50:40.500]of forest at a migratory stop oversight
[00:50:43.350]and played from those speakers the sound of a road.
[00:50:47.610]So just the sound of this phantom road,
[00:50:50.580]absent the actual vehicles or the exhaust
[00:50:52.830]or anything else, was enough to reduce the community
[00:50:56.070]of local birds by about a third.
[00:50:58.800]And to reduce the weight of those that stayed behind
[00:51:02.640]because they were too busy focusing on other things
[00:51:05.760]like vigilance when they were needing
[00:51:07.740]to do things like forage.
[00:51:10.920]Sensory pollution, lighter noise pollution
[00:51:14.010]is the pollution of disconnection.
[00:51:16.590]It severs animals from the information they need
[00:51:20.130]to perceive in the world around them.
[00:51:22.470]And I think relevant to us,
[00:51:24.210]it severs us from the natural world around us.
[00:51:28.200]Light pollution makes it really hard,
[00:51:30.000]if not impossible to see the stars in the night sky.
[00:51:34.050]Noise pollution drowns out the sounds of animals
[00:51:36.600]that are around us all the time.
[00:51:38.250]There is a reason why in the early pandemic a lot
[00:51:40.740]of people started saying, hey,
[00:51:42.360]do you hear a lot of birds right now?
[00:51:46.710]There were these memes that were circulating
[00:51:48.660]about how nature is healing
[00:51:50.220]as if the birds were reclaiming the cities
[00:51:53.400]that humans had abandoned.
[00:51:55.440]It's not what happened.
[00:51:56.430]What happened was we were quieter.
[00:51:58.920]And when you're quieter,
[00:51:59.940]you can hear more and over longer distances,
[00:52:03.900]noise pollution collapses all of that.
[00:52:06.030]It shrinks the extent of our sensory bubble
[00:52:09.900]and makes the nature that is on our doorstep feel absent
[00:52:15.003]or inaccessible.
[00:52:18.000]There is a very American notion of wilderness
[00:52:21.330]as being equivalent to stuff like this, right?
[00:52:24.420]Grand landscapes, sweeping vistas,
[00:52:28.830]your Yellowstones and Yosemite and Grand Canyons.
[00:52:34.260]And that's fine if you happen to live
[00:52:35.910]in one of those places.
[00:52:37.260]But I think if that is all your understanding of wilderness
[00:52:41.580]and of nature is, it means that it is
[00:52:45.098]disconnected from the lives of most of us.
[00:52:49.140]It is something remote that you vacation at
[00:52:52.950]and not something that you appreciate all the time.
[00:52:57.270]And if it's not something that you appreciate all the time,
[00:52:59.790]that's something that's not part of your daily life,
[00:53:02.940]you will feel less impetus to be curious about it,
[00:53:07.260]to care for it, and to want to protect it.
[00:53:12.510]Two years ago, I moved from Washington DC
[00:53:15.750]to Oakland in California where I now live.
[00:53:19.110]And one of the things that immediately happened was I just
[00:53:21.540]heard so many more birds around my neighborhood.
[00:53:25.200]And this is an Anna's hummingbird
[00:53:26.880]that I photographed in my own yard.
[00:53:31.110]My morning walks with Typo are now replete
[00:53:33.570]with birdsong in a way they didn't use to be.
[00:53:36.360]And this is one of many reasons why I took up birding
[00:53:40.230]and why I am
[00:53:41.790]so appalled at having missed the cranes on this
[00:53:45.450]particular visit.
[00:53:47.430]Terrible excuse for a bird.
[00:53:50.640]But this is a really crucial part of my life
[00:53:54.000]and it means that I appreciate the nature that's all
[00:53:57.690]around me so much more deeply than I used to.
[00:54:01.830]These animals, a black skimmer, a snow bunting,
[00:54:04.950]a lazuli bunting, golden eagle, a hunting barn owl
[00:54:08.460]were all taken within about half an hour of my home.
[00:54:13.170]I go out birding all the time now.
[00:54:15.360]Well, except when I'm here apparently.
[00:54:18.060]And it reminds me that nature is all around us.
[00:54:21.930]It's there for my ears and my eyes and my heart to savor.
[00:54:27.420]The umwelt concept is similar.
[00:54:30.570]It tells me that I can go on grand voyages
[00:54:35.250]to appreciate worlds that exist in parallel with my own
[00:54:40.410]without having to go anywhere just through feats
[00:54:43.860]of effortful imagination, through curiosity
[00:54:47.400]and through empathy.
[00:54:49.290]I can go on these incredible trips
[00:54:52.950]even in my backyard.
[00:54:57.930]This ability is a gift
[00:55:00.390]and I think it might be a uniquely human one.
[00:55:03.210]I say that with some humility
[00:55:04.830]because there is a long track record of people claiming
[00:55:07.260]that humans can do this or that,
[00:55:08.760]and other animals can't.
[00:55:10.980]And those statements are almost always wrong.
[00:55:13.830]And yet the umwelt idea is not obvious.
[00:55:17.670]We know about it through centuries
[00:55:20.280]if not millennia of scholarship.
[00:55:22.980]It's not something that comes obviously to people.
[00:55:26.575]I certainly don't think
[00:55:27.960]that my dog Typo is sitting there wondering about the colors
[00:55:31.590]that this crow can see
[00:55:33.000]and I don't think the crow is sitting there
[00:55:35.160]thinking about the olfactory world of my dog.
[00:55:39.810]But I can wonder about both of those things
[00:55:43.650]and I can tell you about those.
[00:55:46.080]And that is a gift
[00:55:49.020]and I think that it's one that we should cherish
[00:55:51.870]and make use of.
[00:55:53.760]Thank you very much.
[00:55:55.119](audience applauding)
[00:56:15.530]And one last thing before we open for, oh no, hang on.
[00:56:19.380]Sorry, I don't need a slide.
[00:56:20.760]One last thing before we open to questions.
[00:56:23.190]Next, wait, what month is it?
[00:56:25.710]It's March. Thank you.
[00:56:28.860]In May the Young Reader's Edition
[00:56:32.250]of Immense World is coming out.
[00:56:34.080]So this is a special version of the book
[00:56:36.023]that is targeted to kids age 10 and up.
[00:56:39.660]Same kinds of stories abridged for
[00:56:42.090]and adapted for a younger audience with really,
[00:56:44.910]really beautiful illustrations throughout.
[00:56:48.060]I'm really proud of it. I'm excited it's coming out in May.
[00:56:50.820]Go look for it in bookstores and libraries near you.
[00:56:54.300]It's also dedicated to Typo, which is kind of sweet.
[00:56:57.673](audience applauding)
[00:57:06.840]Ed, once again, thank you for sharing your insights
[00:57:10.170]and expertise with us.
[00:57:12.600]To our audience as we go into Q&A,
[00:57:15.120]you can ask questions on your phone by texting ent498
[00:57:21.270]to the number 22333
[00:57:24.570]or by going to pollev.com/ent498
[00:57:29.760]on a computer or browser.
[00:57:34.020]So our first question.
[00:57:38.280]How has this deep dive into senses
[00:57:42.240]changed your relationship with Typo?
[00:57:45.210]Oh, great question.
[00:57:46.590]So the timing's interesting
[00:57:50.250]because the section on dogs in the chapter
[00:57:52.620]of smell was actually the very first thing
[00:57:54.570]I wrote in this book.
[00:57:56.130]And I wrote it about a year and a half
[00:57:59.100]before Typo entered our lives.
[00:58:00.990]Typo is my first dog.
[00:58:02.970]So my entire relationship
[00:58:06.090]with him was completely influenced by this understanding
[00:58:10.470]of the way he smells.
[00:58:11.910]Like we tried to prioritize smell as a part
[00:58:15.450]of his lives from when he was a tiny,
[00:58:17.837]tiny five pound puppy.
[00:58:21.464]We, you know, fed him on this like snuffle mat
[00:58:24.540]where he had to sniff around to get the little kibble.
[00:58:27.180]We took him on smell walks from the very first moment
[00:58:30.870]that he could walk.
[00:58:34.200]And I like to believe that it has contributed
[00:58:42.300]to him just being a lovely happy pup.
[00:58:45.210]I think we know from research that allowing dogs
[00:58:48.360]to embrace their sense of smell makes them more anxious,
[00:58:53.190]sorry, less anxious, happier.
[00:58:55.690]It's a good thing.
[00:58:56.850]And we try and give him that as as part of his life
[00:59:01.020]and I think just more generally, you know,
[00:59:03.840]I think it makes understanding the umwelt idea
[00:59:06.840]just makes me like infinitely curious about his experience.
[00:59:11.220]Even though either we spend all of our time near each other,
[00:59:16.560]I still don't entirely know what he's sensing,
[00:59:19.777]like what he's perceiving.
[00:59:22.410]The weird things that he's paying attention to that I'm not.
[00:59:24.900]And I find that just a constant source of joy and curiosity.
[00:59:31.200]Well you certainly got people curious
[00:59:32.850]'cause about 20 people have asked
[00:59:34.410]why do zebras have stripes?
[00:59:35.850]Oh great.
[00:59:36.934](audience laughs)
[00:59:38.700]So zebra stripes are an anti-fly defense.
[00:59:44.370]There is something about the stripes that confuses the eyes
[00:59:47.970]of biting flies like horse flies,
[00:59:51.090]which when they try and land on a zebra,
[00:59:53.040]always flub the landing,
[00:59:55.195]the experiments to prove, this is hilarious.
[00:59:57.450]They include things like putting a zebra stripe coat
[00:59:59.550]on a horse.
[01:00:02.280]And so why?
[01:00:05.730]It seems that zebras have unusually thin coats for horses.
[01:00:10.170]So they're very biteable.
[01:00:11.970]They live in parts of the world
[01:00:13.080]where biting flies carry a lot of diseases
[01:00:15.270]that are fatal for horses.
[01:00:17.512]And as a result they have evolved to this very unusual
[01:00:22.650]and unorthodox fly proofing.
[01:00:29.850]Can you explain how service animals are trained
[01:00:33.420]to be capable of sensing illnesses
[01:00:35.610]or problems within our bodies?
[01:00:37.890]Yeah, so I mean I can't explain
[01:00:39.360]how they're specifically trained,
[01:00:40.920]but like, you know, to the question of
[01:00:43.470]how can they do this at all, you know,
[01:00:47.220]not to put too fine a point of it,
[01:00:48.750]but like we are all just leaking sacks of chemicals.
[01:00:52.440]Like we're constantly bleeding molecules
[01:00:56.190]into the world and those molecules reflect our status,
[01:01:01.590]they reflect our age, our diet, and our health.
[01:01:06.990]So people who are sick
[01:01:09.420]with different conditions
[01:01:11.100]produce different blends of molecules
[01:01:13.890]from their bodies, which an animal with the right nose
[01:01:17.370]like a dog can be trained to detect.
[01:01:20.400]There are loads of studies,
[01:01:21.780]but dogs being able to like detect various kinds of cancers
[01:01:26.310]or even covid.
[01:01:28.020]Now, I don't necessarily think that
[01:01:30.420]that's the most practical thing in the world.
[01:01:33.210]Like I sort of struggle to see how you would do
[01:01:35.310]that in a medical setting with enough accuracy.
[01:01:40.980]But I think what it shows is
[01:01:46.185]how acute and how finely tuned a dog's sense
[01:01:49.320]of smell can be to cues
[01:01:51.690]that we miss even among ourselves.
[01:01:57.390]Somewhat related to that.
[01:01:59.160]Is it true then that dogs know
[01:02:02.040]when death is near part one,
[01:02:05.130]and two do they mourn?
[01:02:07.990]Okay, so loads of people have stories of like,
[01:02:15.510]you know, my dog or my cat understood
[01:02:19.680]when something was about to happen.
[01:02:21.929]They knew like they detected me being sick
[01:02:24.780]before I knew,
[01:02:25.860]before my doctor knew,
[01:02:26.850]they knew like my loved one was going to die
[01:02:30.090]before it happened.
[01:02:32.390]It's really hard to say in part
[01:02:36.660]because animals do weird stuff all the time
[01:02:41.319]and it's just so easy
[01:02:43.020]to like retrospectively add a story on the weird thing
[01:02:46.890]that they just happen to be doing.
[01:02:50.820]Is it possible?
[01:02:52.590]Sure.
[01:02:54.000]It doesn't seem implausible to me.
[01:02:56.520]Does it happen?
[01:02:57.690]I don't know.
[01:02:59.760]It is really hard to think
[01:03:01.050]how you would like design a study to confirm
[01:03:04.530]whether that actually happens or not.
[01:03:08.070]Whether they mourn.
[01:03:11.730]I don't know the answer to that.
[01:03:14.806]For dogs, like dogs are incredibly empathetic.
[01:03:18.990]Like we have selected them for that.
[01:03:21.900]Like we basically took wolves
[01:03:24.120]and made them into like empathy engines.
[01:03:27.120]So would a dog miss its owner? Like sure.
[01:03:32.790]Would it understand that that owner is not coming back?
[01:03:35.850]I don't know, actually. That's a harder cognitive problem.
[01:03:39.390]Do other animals mourn
[01:03:41.010]and grieve like yes, very clearly.
[01:03:44.700]Elephants do it, killer whales do it.
[01:03:48.600]A lot of creatures that you might not expect do it.
[01:03:51.810]I think these questions hint at one of the core challenges
[01:03:55.680]to understanding animals, which is this tension
[01:03:59.670]between anthropomorphism on one hand,
[01:04:03.270]which is unduly ascribing human influences
[01:04:07.380]and human ways of existing onto other species.
[01:04:10.890]And then anthropo-denial, which is to forget
[01:04:14.130]how connected we are to the natural world
[01:04:16.650]and how much similarities we share.
[01:04:19.080]Neither of these is correct
[01:04:21.300]and I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
[01:04:26.040]How has your understanding of umwelt changed
[01:04:30.630]or modified your perspective as a journalist?
[01:04:33.960]Oh yeah.
[01:04:39.240]So all of my work,
[01:04:42.870]whether it's an "Immense World"
[01:04:45.930]or whether it is the pandemic reporting
[01:04:49.621]that you mentioned in your intro
[01:04:51.960]and that maybe some of you know me better for,
[01:04:55.680]is about revealing hidden sides of the world around us
[01:04:59.640]that we would otherwise miss
[01:05:01.680]and that we really need to know about.
[01:05:04.290]Sometimes that the bits of information
[01:05:08.820]that our sensors can't perceive.
[01:05:11.160]Sometimes it's the societal failings
[01:05:14.665]that make us incredibly vulnerable to a new spreading virus.
[01:05:20.010]Sometimes it's entire groups of people
[01:05:22.560]with conditions like long covid
[01:05:24.886]whose very illnesses make them removed from normal,
[01:05:30.060]everyday healthy abled society
[01:05:33.480]and that make them invisible
[01:05:35.460]and often dismissed and gaslit.
[01:05:38.910]My entire body of work is centered around values
[01:05:43.830]of curiosity and of empathy,
[01:05:46.830]which I've already mentioned about wanting
[01:05:49.320]to understand the lives of others,
[01:05:52.410]whether animal or otherwise,
[01:05:54.660]that are very different from your own
[01:05:57.090]and finding those lives worthy of extending the full force
[01:06:01.080]of your attention, your care, and your respect.
[01:06:05.913](audience applauding)
[01:06:14.972]Thank you, ED, for what has been an incredibly interesting
[01:06:18.840]and informative evening.
[01:06:21.270]He will be available shortly
[01:06:23.190]to sign books on the orchestra level.
[01:06:26.760]And thank you to all of you
[01:06:28.440]for attending this evening's E.N. Thompson Forum.
[01:06:31.650]We hope to see you again on Earth Day April 22nd
[01:06:35.460]for the cosmic perspective with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
[01:06:39.150]Thank you all and have a wonderful evening.
[01:06:41.132](audience applauding)
[01:06:49.780](bright music)

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The Amazing Nature of Animal Senses

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