The Vast World: How Animals Perceive a Reality Hidden from Us

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ed Yong invites readers to explore how animals—from tiny insects to enormous mammals—perceive the world around them. Our planet is filled with countless tastes and sounds, textures and smells, shades and vibrations, electric and magnetic fields, but any animal, including humans, is confined from birth to death within its own special sensory bubble—or, as scientists say, umwelt—perceiving through all their senses only a small portion of our vast world. In the book “The Vast World,” Yong takes us beyond the boundaries of our umwelt and together with us tries to imagine what it is like to feel the echo of a fluttering butterfly, the electric charge of a flower, or the hydrodynamic wake of a long-gone herring. We will follow the search for fire-scarred beetles, turtles navigating by the Earth’s magnetic field, and African fish filling the water with electric signals. We will look at the world through four pairs of eyes of a jumping spider, listen to the vibrations of tiny bugs, and find out that a crocodile's snout is no less sensitive than a surgeon's fingers. We will meet the latest discoveries in the field of sensory zoology, understand the threats that sound and light pollution pose to the animal world, and discover what a dog finds interesting at the nearest post.