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481 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 21, 2022
Imagine an elephant in a room. This elephant is not the proverbial weighty issue but an actual weighty mammal. Imagine the room is spacious enough to accommodate it; make it a school gym. Now imagine a mouse has scurried in, too. A robin hops alongside it. An owl perches on an overhead beam. A bat hangs upside down from the ceiling. A rattlesnake slithers along the floor. A spider has spun a web in a corner. A mosquito buzzes through the air. A bumblebee sits upon a potted sunflower. Finally, in the midst of this increasingly crowded hypothetical space, add a human. Let’s call her Rebecca. She’s sighted, curious, and (thankfully) fond of animals. Don’t worry about how she got herself into this mess. Never mind what all these animals are doing in a gym. Consider, instead, how Rebecca and the rest of this imaginary menagerie might perceive one another.and then goes on to explain how, with all their different senses the animals, see, hear, smell and trap or evade each other.
Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, 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.The book is an elucidation of this introduction, the author sharing his enthusiasm, his writing full of warmth for all the animals who share the earth with us. I love books like this, where there is knowledge, enthusiasm and beautiful writing. A 10 star book for me, obviously!
“Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, 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.”
“The Umwelt concept can feel constrictive because it implies that every creature is trapped within the house of its senses. But to me, the idea is wonderfully expansive. It tells us that all is not as it seems and that everything we experience is but a filtered version of everything that we could experience.”
“The first step to understanding another animal’s Umwelt is to understand what it uses its senses for.”
“They punch their prey into submission. They punch anything that intrudes upon their burrows. They punch each other at first contact. Mantis shrimps throw punches like humans throw opinions—frequently, aggressively, and without provocation.
[…]
Imagine that you’re a mantis shrimp. It is a truth universally acknowledged that you are in want of something to punch.”
"The only true voyage ... would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes ... to see the hundred universes that each of them sees."
---Marcel Proust
[An] Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience -- its perceptual world.
... a multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten.
The senses constrain an animal's life, restricting what it can detect and do. But they also define a species' future, and the evolutionary possibilities ahead of it.
The first step to understanding another animal's Umwelt is to understand what it uses its senses for.