“How animals sense the world. Bat echolocation, electric eels, the magnetic compass of birds, the chemical world of moths. The most-cited contemporary popular science book on animal perception.”
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An Immense World is Ed Yong's 2022 popular-science book, the science journalist's most ambitious work after I Contain Multitudes (2016) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Atlantic coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. The structural premise is the Umwelt — the German biology term for the specific perceptual world that each species inhabits, which can be radically different from the perceptual world of other species sharing the same physical environment. Yong runs through the senses systematically: smell, taste, light, color, pain, heat, contact, vibration, sound, echo, electric field, magnetic field. Each chapter brings the reader inside a specific Umwelt (the chemical world of moths, the electric-field-sensing world of catfish, the magnetic-compass world of European robins) through field-research and laboratory-research reporting.
Yong's structural method is the patient layering of empirical research across the chapters; the writing is grounded in field-reporting interviews with the working scientists Yong has traveled to see, with their lab equipment, the animals they study, and the experimental designs that produce the surprising results. The bat-echolocation chapters are some of the strongest contemporary popular-science prose on a specific sense modality. The bird-magnetism chapters take seriously what has been one of the strangest research findings in twentieth-century biology and pulls the reader through the cryptochrome quantum-coherence hypothesis without losing them. The conclusion-chapter material on artificial light at night and ocean noise pollution earns the moral weight the entire book has been building toward.
Recommended as required contemporary popular-science reading, as the right Yong entry point, and as one of the canonical 2020s science books. Compare to Carl Safina's Beyond Words and Frans de Waal's Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? on the broader animal-cognition shelf. The Ed Yong audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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