In the second class of primary school, I did a presentation on Operation Blue Book. UFOs. Since then, UFOs have always been on my radar. That brings you into multi-dimensions, parallel universes, alternate realities, time travel, the paranormal, etc.
Our limited spectrum
The question is always at which frequency or spectrum we are operating. That is exactly what “An Immense World: Discover how animals perceive the world and see nature as you never have before” is about. Our Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, and electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.
Sensing
Absolutely fascinating. Our perception is very, very limited. Senses that seem paranormal to us only appear this way because we are so limited and so painfully unaware of our limitations. We cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can. We are not privy to the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect. We can’t trace the invisible trail of a swimming fish the way a seal can. We can’t feel the air currents created by a buzzing fly the way a wandering spider does. Our ears cannot hear the ultrasonic calls of rodents and hummingbirds or the infrasonic calls of elephants and whales. Our eyes cannot see the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes detect, or the ultraviolet light that birds and bees can sense.
Animals
There are animals that can hear sounds in what seems to us like
perfect silence, see colours in what looks to us like total darkness, and sense vibrations in what feels to us like complete stillness. There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin. Starfish see with the tips of their arms, and sea urchins with their entire bodies.
Augmentation
It is the future of augmentation. Lobster eyes have inspired space telescopes, the ears of a parasitic fly have influenced hearing aids, and military sonar has been honed by work on dolphin sonar.
Examples
Some examples (the book is full of them):
- Dogs can detect a single fingerprint that had been dabbed onto a microscope slide, then left on a rooftop and exposed to the elements for a week.
- Polar bears might be able to navigate across thousands of miles of indistinct ice because glands in their paws leave scent behind with every step.
- Catfish have taste buds spread all over their scale-free bodies, from the tips of their whisker-like barbels to their tails.
- Humans are able to see just 1% of the hundreds of millions of colours that a bird can discriminate. Humans don’t even see the same colours as each other.
- A thirteen-lined ground squirrel, however, can stay between 2°C (36°F) and 7°C (45°F) for half a year.
- Our own fingertips are among nature’s most sensitive touch organs. Otters are 30 times more sensitive.
- The mole can identify its prey, swallow it, and begin searching for the next mouthful in an average of 230 milliseconds, down to as little as 120 milliseconds. That’s as fast as a human blink. It’s moving so fast that it’s almost getting ahead of its brain.
- Fish displace water in front of them, creating a flow field that envelops their bodies. Obstacles distort that field, and the lateral line can detect those distortions, providing the fish with a hydrodynamic awareness of its surroundings.
- Peacocks can shake their feathers at exactly 26 Hz—that is, 26 times a second
- The tiger wandering spider’s legs are covered in hundreds of thousands of hairs, which are packed so densely that there can be 400 in a square millimetre.
- The feathers of the conspicuous facial disc that make owls look owlish are thick, stiff, and densely packed. They act like radar dishes that collect incoming sound waves and funnel them toward the ear holes.
- The call of Fin whales travels for 13,000 miles. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field.
- A zebra finch’s song must sound entirely different to a zebra finch than to us. They ignore the big acoustic picture in favour of the details. Zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note.
- Mice, rats, and many other rodents do indeed make a wide repertoire of “ultrasonic” calls
- The greater wax moth can even hear frequencies near 300 kHz—the highest limit of any animal by some margin.
- Bats fly so quickly that they must update those snapshots regularly to detect fast-approaching obstacles or fast-escaping prey. They do so with vocal muscles that can contract up to 200 times a second
- The bat’s nervous system is so sensitive that it can detect differences in echo delay of just one or two millionths of a second, which translates to a physical distance of less than a millimetre.
- Dolphins can peer inside bodies.
- Electric eel species can discharge 860 volts—enough to incapacitate a horse
- The black ghost’s electric field usually oscillates once every 0.001 seconds, with an error of just 0.00000014 seconds.
- Every day, around 40,000 thunderstorms crackle around the world. Collectively, they turn Earth’s atmosphere into a giant electric circuit. Even on calm, sunny days, the air carries a voltage of about 100 volts per meter above ground.
- Spiders can sense Earth’s electric field and ride it.
- Bogongs are able to sense Earth’s magnetic field
- Earth’s magnetic field is extremely weak. It is so faint that the random jiggling movements of an animal’s molecules can carry 200 billion times more energy. No creature should be able to sense such an absurdly weak stimulus.
The mix
Smell, vibration, chemicals, sound, pheromones, taste, sight, frequency, wavelengths, colour, pain, temperature, touch, currents, ground surface vibrations, echolocation, electric fields, magnetic fields, those are the ones we know of. There must be more. Imagine the possibilities of all these capabilities combined. Maybe we have those abilities already.
An entire nervous system acting in concert
Animals tap into as many streams of information as their nervous systems can handle, using the strengths of one sense to compensate for the shortcomings of another. Dogs are masters of smell, but note their large ears. Owls are masters of hearing, but note their large eyes. Insects can taste body heat. The antennae of ants and other insects are organs of both smell and touch. Animals cannot make sense of what’s around them without first making sense of themselves. And this means that an animal’s Umwelt is the product not just of its sense organs but of its entire nervous system acting in concert.
To truly understand them, we need to think about them as part of a unified whole.
The octopus as an example
An octopus’s central nervous system contains around 500 million neurons.
But only a third of these neurons are located in the animal’s head, within the central brain and the adjacent optic lobes that receive information from the eyes. The remaining 320 million are in the arms. Each arm “has a large and relatively complete nervous system, which seems barely to communicate with the other arms. An octopus effectively has 9 brains with their own agendas. Even the 300 suckers on each arm are somewhat independent. Meanwhile, it simultaneously touches and tastes using 10,000 mechanoreceptors and chemoreceptors on its rim.
Sensory pollution
Through centuries of effort, people have learned much about the sensory worlds of other species. But in a fraction of the time, we have upended those worlds. We have filled the night with light, the silence with noise, and the soil and water with unfamiliar molecules. We have distracted animals from what they actually need to sense, drowned out the cues they depend upon, and lured them, like moths to a flame, into sensory traps.
- Two-thirds of the world’s population lived in light-polluted areas, where the nights were at least 10% brighter than natural darkness.
- Around 40% of humankind is permanently bathed in the equivalent of perpetual moonlight, and around 25% constantly experiences an artificial twilight that exceeds the full moon.
- Human activity has doubled the background noise levels in 63% of protected spaces, and increased them tenfold in 21%.
- Two-thirds of Europeans are immersed in ambient noise equivalent to the sound of perpetual rainfall.
- Between World War II and 2008, the global shipping fleet more than tripled, and began moving 10 times more cargo at higher speeds.40 Together, they raised the levels of low-frequency noise in the oceans by 32 times
- Over the last century, runoff from farms, mines, and sewage filled the lake with nutrients that spurred the growth of clouding, choking algae.
Dipping in
This ability to dip into other Umwelten is our greatest sensory skill.
A bogong moth will never know what a zebra finch hears in its song, a zebra finch will never feel the electric buzz of a black ghost knifefish, a knifefish will never see through the eyes of a mantis shrimp, a mantis shrimp will never smell the way a dog can, and a dog will never understand what it is like to be a bat. We will never fully do any of these things either, but we are the only animal that can even come close. We may not ever know what it is to be an octopus, but at least we know that octopuses exist and that their experiences differ from ours.
Beyond human intelligence
If you believe in the importance of embodied intelligence and the power of natural intelligence, we might have to look at this again and differently. Also read “Ways of being”. You will understand what I mean. Within nature itself, there are whole new worlds to explore. Worlds an AI can never understand. That is our advantage.
