Book Review: An Immense World - How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong

This is a detailed examination of the various senses possessed by animals. Some will be intimately familiar to you - like sight and sound - whereas some will seem strange and uncanny - like magnetic detection and electro-sensing. Some straddle an almost understandable space like echolocation or tetra-chromatic vision.

This isn't a game of Top Trumps where all the animals are ranked by power. Instead there's a gentle and passionate exploration of what these senses might mean to their owners. It is refreshingly candid about what we don't know, while always trying to convey a sense of wonder about the inherent Umwelt experienced by the animal.

But goodness me is it long. It seems that every time the editor told the author to cut out a paragraph, he stuck it in a footnote instead. The text is well referenced, but so are the footnotes, which means occasionally encountering sentences formatted like this:

Despite several frustrating false leads, nobody’s ever found them.^{fn11,36,37,38,39}

Speaking of which, the general formatting of the eBook is poor. The CSS contains all sorts of weird stuff which I needed to turn off, and is full of comments which probably should have been stripped before the book was distributed.

Science publishers still haven't grasped that eBooks don't need to relegate glossy images to the back of the book - they can go inline with the text!

This is a funny, heartfelt, and (perhaps overly) thorough book. It will gleefully send you down rabbit holes - even if you're ill-equipped to see in the dark and sense the bugs around you.