This magnificent book reveals the strange and mysterious ways that creatures sense their surroundings – pushing our understanding of them to the limit
callops have eyes. Not just two eyes, like humans have, or eight, like most spiders do, but up to 200 of them, each clasped by a thin, wavy tentacle protruding from the inner edges of the corrugated shell. Considering how rudimentary a scallop’s brain is, these eyes are surprisingly sophisticated. Play a scallop a video of juicy particles drifting by in the water, as researchers at the University of South Carolina have done, and it will likely open its shell, as if to take a bite.
It’s a neat enough explanation, but it’s not true. The reality, as with most cases in Ed Yong’s magnificent new book on animal perception, is more complicated, more mysterious, more wondrously strange. A British science writer based in the US, Yong is drawn to material that pushes our understanding to the limits. His first book,
We may feel like we are the masters of our planet, having mapped every inch of its landmass and stared into the guts of an atom, but when it comes to understanding what it’s like to be a songbird using the earth’s magnetic field to navigate across continents, we barely know where to start.
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