AN IMMENSE WORLD
HOW ANIMAL SENSES REVEAL THE HIDDEN REALMS AROUND US ED YONG
Bodley Head, 464pp, £20
Science writer Ed Yong won a Pulitzer Prize for his brilliantly researched articles on Covid, and An Immense
World, his study of animal perception, has been rapturously received. It is ‘magnificent’ wrote Kilian Fox in the
Guardian, observing that Yong shows that the reality of life on earth is ‘more complicated, more mysterious, more wondrously strange’ than we can ever have imagined.
In the New York Times, Jennifer Szalai thought Yong’s revelations ‘thrilling’, praising his gifts as both scientific researcher and storyteller. ‘A dolphin that echo-locates a human in water’, she learned, ‘can perceive not only the human’s outer shape but also what’s inside, including skeleton and lungs.’ And ‘tree frog embryos – ensconced inside their unhatched eggs – can detect the vibrations of an attacking predator and release an enzyme from their faces that dissolves the casings that house them, allowing them to escape.’ For Rhys Blakely in the Times, it was ‘fantastic, and he noted how recent our knowledge is. ‘We only realised that humpback whales sang in 1960. Mice may be one of the most studied animals in laboratories across the world, but it was not until the 1970s that we worked out that they were secretly speaking to each other, using high-pitched squeaks beyond the range of human ears.’
In the New Scientist, nature writer Mark Cocker was dazzled by the story of the emerald jewel wasp. ‘It possesses a sting with a touchsensitive tip that it can insert into the midsection of a much larger cockroach prey. This injection briefly paralyses the victim’s locomotion centre, but a second sting fired into the roach’s brain tranquillises it for the rest of its short life. In the state of a “submissive zombie”, the roach will attend the wasp’s lair to serve as fresh protein for the jewel wasp’s progeny. Such is the wasp’s control of its victim that it can use its antennae to lead the roach along, much as a human might walk a dog.’ Yong’s book is, wrote Cocker, ‘a masterpiece’.