Fantastic non-fiction.

One of those books that makes science entertaining. It reminded me of The Body by Bill Bryson. That book made 1st year Anatomy interesting.

An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us is a 2022 book by Ed Yong that really impressed.

MOST interesting to me was the mystery behind how all kinds of creatures can migrate so accurately. In 2025 we can still barely grasp how that is possible. It might be partially visual. Birds might SEE something in the direction of flight.

The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every kind of animal, including humans, is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of our immense world. 

In An Immense World, author and Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses, allowing us to perceive the skeins of scent, waves of electromagnetism, and pulses of pressure that surround us.

We encounter beetles that are drawn to fires, turtles that can track the Earth’s magnetic fields, fish that fill rivers with electrical messages, and even humans who wield sonar like bats.

We discover that a crocodile’s scaly face is as sensitive as a lover’s fingertips, that the eyes of a giant squid evolved to see sparkling whales, that plants thrum with the inaudible songs of courting bugs, and that even simple scallops have complex vision.

We learn what bees see in flowers, what songbirds hear in their tunes, and what dogs smell on the street. We listen to stories of pivotal discoveries in the field, while looking ahead at the many mysteries that remain unsolved. 

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Humans have better vision than any other mammal — but far inferior to birds of prey, some of which can spot a moving rat at 1 mile distance.

Evolution is amazing.

Trial and error over millions of years works.

Ed Yong is a British-American science journalist and author.  Born in Malaysia.

In 2021, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for a series on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ed Yong reads his own audio book. Amazon.