How to Smell like a Dog, with Ed Yong

did get hit by a mantis shrimp,

which

has the most powerful punch in nature.

This was a very, very small mantis shrimp, and it still hurt.

Science chats with our favorite nerds.

Yeah.

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus today on the show.

The amazing superpowers of animals.

Some animals can see things that we can't see.

They can hear things that we can't hear, touch things that we will never feel.

And so today on the show, we are diving into their world to talk about the groundbreaking science of how animals perceive.

And to go on this journey, we'll be chatting to Ed Young.

He's a Pulitzer Prize winning science writer.

And we'll be talking about his book, An Immense World, How Animal senses reveal the hidden realms around it and i think you're gonna love this chat you are gonna look at your dog in a totally different light by the end of this chat you're gonna appreciate how eyes have literally painted the world and you may even feel sorry for the humble cockroach If you are listening to this on Spotify, you can also be watching it because it's on video.

Hello.

My interview with Ed Young is coming up just after the break.

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Welcome back today on the show, the wonderful Ed Young.

Hi, Ed.

Welcome to the show.

Hello, yeah.

Thanks for having me.

In your book,

you say that sort of regardless of our technology or intellect, we are really perceiving only a thin fraction of all there is to perceive.

Our sense of the world is an illusion.

Yes.

So tell me more about that.

Every creature has its own particular ways of sensing the world, its own set of sights and sounds and smells and textures that it has access to.

So we're all trapped in our own little sensory bubbles, and there is a wonderful word for such a bubble.

That word is umvelt.

It's just German for environment, but it has a very special meaning in this context.

And it's one of my favorite

ideas in all of biology because it tells us that

no matter where we are

and no matter which kind of living thing we are, we really are only experiencing a tiny fraction of all there is to experience.

It's such a lovely idea as we're walking around in the world to think about what else is there?

What else could I

be seeing or perceiving if I was a different animal?

Yeah,

I agree.

I think it means that there's so much wonder to be had everywhere.

If you

dive into water, depending on the part of the world you're in, you might be surrounded by the electric fields generated by fish that can make their own electricity.

You'll be surrounded by turbulent currents that are left behind by swimming animals that you won't be able to feel.

You'll be suffused by the magnetic field of the earth itself, which you won't be able to detect.

There's all of this stuff, all these signals around us that we don't perceive and that other animals do.

Electric fish can detect each other's signals.

Seals can detect the tracks left behind by swimming fish.

Sea turtles can detect the magnetic field of the earth itself.

Yeah.

And now

I want to move through some of the senses.

And one of the things that perhaps we get wrong about ourselves,

which is the sense of smell.

I think

we have this idea that humans don't have a great sense of smell.

I think this sort of evolutionary

chit chat that you hear,

this sort of story, I guess, I've heard since primary school is like, now we are visual creatures and we don't really use our smell.

It's been thrown off to the side.

But is that entirely true?

How bad is a human's sense of smell?

Yeah, it's actually all right.

You know, I'm not going to tell you that our sense of smell is as

good as, say, an elephant's or a dog's.

They have hardware that we don't have.

Humans really aren't too bad at it.

Like we have decent noses.

We can smell a lot of different kinds of chemicals.

We can detect some of them at concentrations that rival champion sniffers like dogs.

And in your book, you did a fun experiment.

involving getting on all fours.

Tell me about it.

Yes.

So I went to see a woman named Alexandra Horowitz, who studies dogs,

dog cognition, a dog's sense of smell.

She got a length of string that had been scented with chocolate

and she laid it on the floor.

And my task was to,

with a blindfold on, follow the path of the string.

So I got down on all fours

and I sniffed at the string and I did basically what a dog does, which is to swing your head left and right while you're sniffing.

And by doing this, you can follow the path of the string.

And I did.

But

two things.

First, it took a long time.

And second, I was hyperventilating as I was doing it because I am not like we are not used to just going.

Right, because our the the way our noses work, every time you blow, every time you exhale, you lose that perception of whatever you're smelling right so you have to just

repeatedly if you're doing that many times in a row you start

it's not good um

a dog you know and why doesn't that happen to dogs why could dogs keep going So dogs can do it for a bunch of different reasons.

And Alexandra's dog Finn did the same task, followed the string much more accurately, much more quickly.

He was doing it in fractions of a second, in what took me many minutes and with no effort.

He does that for a couple of reasons.

So, when a dog breathes in,

that airstream is cleaved into two by structures inside its skull.

So, there's a large stream of air that goes down into the lungs and is for breathing.

And then there is another smaller stream that goes to a chamber in the back of the snout that is dedicated for smell and smell alone.

So, there's this constant influx of like scented air into the part of the dog's

head that is responsible for processing smell.

That's not what happens in us.

Cool.

The dog, it's just getting this constant conveyor belt of scented air going into its nose, whether it's on the inhale or the exhale.

And again, that means that its experience of smell is not this.

strobing, flickering thing that I am having to fight against.

It's continuous.

I like to think of it as closer to our experience of vision, right?

Where we have, even though we're blinking all the time we we don't you know our our view of the world doesn't black out um it's it's smooth it's continuous and why

do they love the smell of a human crutch

what

um

i think uh so i think that is also related to what how dogs interact with each other, right?

So what happens when two dogs meet?

They sniff each other, right?

And they sniff each other usually

in the groin.

They'll do that, like, that like cool yin-yang thing where they're both sniffing each other's groins.

That's because

all animals to various degrees are just leaking sacks of chemicals, right?

We are just like

spewing molecules into the world around us all the time, whether we like it or not.

And we do it especially,

you know, from like moist membranes more than other places, so like our breath, our groins, armpits.

Um, and these uh, and you know, for us, as we've said, we don't go around sniffing each other in any of these areas.

Um, dogs do because to them, smell uh, provides many clues about the other in the individual that they're meeting, right?

Smell provides clues about identity, but also about things like age, health, diet.

Now tell me about this remarkable chemical that gives us sea smell, like the smell of the sea.

Yeah, so this chemical is called dimethyl sulfide or DMS.

It smells kind of seaweedy, a little oystery.

It's the smell of the sea.

We've talked about how there's been this long-standing myth that the human sense of smell is terrible.

Equally, there has been this very long-standing myth that birds do not smell at all.

It's a lie.

Birds do smell.

Many of them smell very, very well.

And seabirds like albatrosses are some of them.

DMS is one of the things that they are paying attention to.

So when there's a ton of creole munching down on a ton of plankton under the surface of the water, when there's just a lot of life out there, that releases a ton of DMS.

It's so cool.

It's like an oven with cookies baking.

Yes,

exactly like that.

Exactly like that.

And

to a bird with a right nose, like an albatross,

the scent of DMS reveals the parts of the ocean that are richest in life and so richest in food.

What I love about this is that the ocean seems completely featureless to us, right?

The open ocean is just this flat landscape.

It's two-dimensional.

It looks kind of boring.

That is what it looks like to our eyes, but to the nose of an albatross foraging over the ocean, it's very three-dimensional.

It has these mountains and valleys of DMS and other scents

that give the bird an idea of what's going on beneath the surface of the water.

It's not flat, it's not featureless, and it only is that way to our umbelt, but not those of a bird like an albatross.

From smell to sight.

So the amazingness of the human eye is often used by creationists to say that God must have created the world because evolution can't create such a complex structure.

And as you write in the book, Darwin...

himself wasn't sure how complicated human eyes could have evolved and writing in the origin of species that to suppose the eye had been formed, quote, by natural selection seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

But he did say as well that if we could find other versions of the eye, like sort of crappier gradations, like if we could see the sort of beginnings of the human eye and then in other animals, maybe that would suggest it was evolution, which is sort of funny because that's how the pyramids are.

People see the beautiful pyramids of Giza, but there's crappier ones down the road.

They see the pyramids, and they're like, aliens must have done it.

And it's like, well, it's because you didn't see the crappier ones that they were, you know, before they perfected.

That's right.

Right.

Like the beta test pyramids before we landed on this like deluxe model.

Yeah.

Right.

So

when you look through the animal queendom, do you see like variations of what might become the human eye?

Yeah, you absolutely do.

And, you know,

Darwin can relax.

We have it sorted.

So, yeah,

there are actually animals with every possible degree of eye.

The simplest eye, really, is just a single photoreceptor.

So it's a single cell that is sensitive to light

that can that where light

light triggers a chemical change in the cell, which leads to an electrical signal being sent.

And that cell can detect the presence of light.

Once you're sensitive to light, once you can detect it, then you can add things like a little bit of pigment.

If you have pigment on one side, it creates shade.

And now you can not only detect light, but work out where it's coming from.

When you have lots of those clustered together, then not only can you detect where light is coming from, but you now

start to have the very rudimentary image, like with very few pixels, but an image nonetheless.

Then you can add an element on top of that, a lens that helps to focus the light to give you extra acuity.

The point is that you can actually very easily see how an eye can build up over time from something that is really unlike an eye at all.

That doesn't take a lot of generations to actually happen.

And we have organisms that have every possible step along the way.

And I think it also

actually

animals

get the kinds of sense organs they need.

And eyes that are, you know, quote unquote, worse than ours exist because their owners don't need to do anything fancier.

You know, an eagle has an incredible eye because an eagle is soaring at great heights and trying to detect rabbits at large distances.

A starfish has a considerably worse eye because a starfish is not doing that.

All a starfish needs to do is to find the shady shelter of a reef and

scuttle into some crevice somewhere.

I don't want to fall into that trap of to say that we are at the top of the

some evolutionary pinnacle.

It's all just a beautiful rainbow.

Sure, yeah.

And then when we, just to really land the point that, you know, humans are not at the pinnacle of the eye evolutionary story, when we think of color, humans can, you know, most humans can see the colours of the rainbow, but lots of animals can see in ultraviolet light.

So beyond the purple or violet.

Right.

Can you help us imagine the world of ultraviolet light, whether it's how our world would look different for birds and flowers?

Yeah, so flowers are a great place to start.

So many flowers have evolved to attract animals like bees and hummingbirds and other pollinators, almost all of which can see ultraviolet.

And if you can see ultraviolet, you can see many signals on flowers that human eyes miss.

So, sunflowers, for example, just look yellow to us, but they have this beautiful ultraviolet halo in the middle of them.

Many other flowers have things like this, these like bull's eyes and like landing strips, I think of them as signs that attract pollinators to the flower.

Birds also, you know, all birds can see ultraviolet to a different extent.

And

if you can see ultraviolet, you can see patterns on the feathers of birds that, again, our eyes miss.

Here in the US, the American robin has a famously red breast.

Males and females both have red breasts.

The sexes are a little bit hard to tell apart in this bird.

But to us, the birds have no problem because the male's breast blazes with ultraviolet as well as red.

The females do not.

So robins can easily tell them apart, tell each other apart.

And then

that's just, you know, ultraviolet is color in and of itself.

You can also blend ultraviolet with other colors.

So

our

most

people have eyes with three kinds of

color sensing cells, let's call them.

They're called cone cells.

They're the ones responsible for our color vision.

And

my dog has only two.

So his rainbow is much more limited than mine.

Birds have four.

So their rainbows are just so much more expansive.

A typical bird can probably see about 100 times more colors.

than what we can perceive,

which is just stunning to me because so many birds are already just shockingly colorful and beautiful.

Like, take the most colorful bird that you can imagine, and now try and imagine that that bird has, you know, maybe a hundred times more colors on it to another bird than what you are currently seeing.

It's amazing.

It's like, stop it.

At that point, you're like, stop it.

You know, I know, right?

Like, enough, please.

Yeah.

Did you have to wear that to the Met Gala?

Like, did you, you know?

Yeah.

so

now let's look at sounds and hearing.

Um, in the 1960s, researchers got hold of this amazing recording of an animal that ultimately became this huge cultural phenomenon, inspiring a Star Trek movie, um,

also

an entire animal rights movement.

Um, can you tell me about this?

Yeah, um, so we're talking about whales, um,

and um,

uh,

whales produce the the and we're talking about the really big whales too.

So things like blue whales, fin whales, the largest animals that exist and have ever existed,

they communicate with each other with infrasound.

So that's sound that's too low for the human ear to detect and sound that travels over very, very, very large distances.

In the ocean, a blue whale's call could conceivably traverse the entire span of, say, the Atlantic.

Which is

crazy to think about.

It is absolutely crazy.

So

there were definitely cases where you could have a whale calling off the coast of Europe and detect that call with a hydrophone, an underwater microphone,

off the coast of the US.

When the Navy first picked up these kinds of sounds,

They were,

you know, they didn't know what to make of them.

And eventually they tracked the sounds to their sources, which were very large whales, like blue and fin whales.

I think it's still an open question of whether whales are really communicating over those kinds of distances, right?

So, you know, is a whale off the coast of Europe having a chat with a whale off the coast of the US?

It seems like implausible, right?

Those messages would take maybe half an hour or so to move across that distance.

But

maybe.

Another animal superpower that you talk about is echolocation, which is this amazing ability of bats and dolphins to use echo to find their way and their prey.

But in the book, you met a person who can echolocate.

Tell us about

that.

Yeah, so his name is Daniel Kish.

He is one of several human echolocators.

So he is blind and he has been blind since very close to his first birthday.

And

he navigates through the world with a cane, as many blind people do, but also by making these very loud clicks with his tongue.

So if I try to click with my tongue,

The noise is kind of pathetic and wet and muffled.

His is like much closer to me snapping with my fingers.

It's sharp, it's loud, produces a very strong echo.

He does this as he moves about his neighborhood, and I went on a walk with him.

And Daniel is incredibly independent.

The cane helps, of course, but with his echolocation, he can tell when we're walking past a house, a car,

a lawn, you know, whether there's a fence next to us.

How would he just from it?

Sounds a little different.

The

texture of the grass is different from the texture of concrete or texture of pavement.

He can tell, you know, when there's a tree, a branch blocking his path.

You know, a fence, he can tell whether it's like chain link or slatted.

Were you walking with him and testing him?

Like, obviously, no, no, he's narrating.

Like, you know, I'm just walking along.

He's narrating.

At some point, there's a branch across our path, and I duck and I forget to say, hey, Daniel, there's a branch.

And he gets it, like he knows.

The word echolocation was actually defined in a paper that was about bats and humans.

And everyone kind of forgot the human bits, and the human bit.

And, you know, a lot of people know that bats can do this.

So, what bats are doing is that they are releasing very, very high-pitched ultrasonic calls, too high for us to hear.

They're doing it at often incredible speeds, up to a couple of hundred times a second and they're listening for those echoes bouncing off objects in the world around them and by timing how long it takes for the sound to go out and to return the bat can translate that time

into distance.

Amazing.

Daniel is basically doing exactly the same thing.

His clicks are not ultrasonic like those of a bat.

So they provide a little less information to him.

But it's basically the same thing.

He is using the timing of rebounding sound to map the world around him.

How did it feel to be walking with him?

So

it felt amazing.

It is very easy to

watch Daniel and to think of this as some kind of superpower, but like every way of sensing the world,

it has some strengths and it has drawbacks too.

It's really bad for anything that involves a small thing against a large thing.

So if I wanted to hide from Daniel, I would stand right up against a wall.

And the thing is, bats also suffer from this problem.

Bats really can easily detect a moth in air, but if the moth is sitting on a leaf,

most bats will really struggle to find it.

So one of my favorite stories that Daniel told me is that

he was once asked to try and tell

the difference between two objects that to him sounded exactly the same.

One was a stuffed bear, like a teddy bear, and the other was a champagne bottle.

And those obviously look different to us, but they both distort and muffle echoes in different ways.

So the champagne bottle has all these curves to it, which send the sound bouncing off in random directions.

The teddy bear is very soft and fluffy, so it's absorbing and like doing the same kinds of things to the sound.

So both of those are returning very bad, uninformative echoes.

Interesting.

So they basically sound kind of the same.

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Welcome back.

I'm here with Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Young.

Then on to touch.

So animals use touch and vibrations in all sorts of exciting ways.

But I think one of my favorites from your book was the Emerald Jewel Wasp, which when I saw a picture of it,

it's a gorgeous wasp.

Oh, it's stunning.

Inch long, metallic turquoise body.

It looks like it's wearing orange bike shorts, kind of.

Yes, yes, it does.

Yeah.

I mean,

the metallic green and orange combo is really working for us.

I also want

that combo.

I don't know, I'm not sure I could get away with, but it's, yeah.

No, right.

So tell us how she uses touch.

The emerald cockroach wasp is a parasite that lays eggs inside the bodies of still living cockroaches.

The young wasp hatches from those eggs and then basically eats the cockroach alive, right?

So nom nom nom, it turns into an adult wasp, it bursts out, it flies away, it finds its own cockroach, the horrible cycle repeats.

It's a special kind of parasite because it also manipulates the mind and the behavior of its host.

So, the wasp's sting not only lays an egg, but it also delivers venom to the cockroach's brain that changes its behavior.

It makes it very docile.

And, you know,

we all know when cockroaches are threatened, they run away very easily.

But once stung, the cockroach becomes very, very amenable.

So the wasp actually grabs it by its antennae and leads it to its nest like a person walking a dog.

It really does.

We actually have a video, and it really does look like it's just walking this cockroach.

It's a lot bigger than the wasp, like a dog.

It's crazy.

It's wild.

It really does.

Now, where touch comes in is

how does the wasp know

where to inject venom, right?

So it's got, it's, it's stung the cockroach.

The tip of the sting is full of

touch sensors.

So the sting not only is an egg-laying tube and a drill, but it's also

kind of like a hand, right?

It's an organ of touch.

And the wasp can detect the

texture, the shape maybe of a cockroach brain

and uses that as a cue.

So it'll go in,

like it sees the head, goes

through the carapace.

That's right.

Yep.

But then it has to feel for the little brain, right?

Because it has to sting the brain.

Yep.

Yep.

You know, and

there have been some great experiments showing that it's doing this by replacing a cockroach brain with like

stuff that feels very different, stuff that feels like a fake brain and seeing what the wasps do.

So yeah,

the wasp is absolutely using its sense of touch to feel for the distinctive feel of a cockroach brain.

And then one of the last senses I want to look at

is pain that you talk about in your book and you

sort of asking this question of whether all other animals feel pain,

writing caterpillars will continue munching on a leaf while parasitic wasp larvae eat them from the inside out, suggesting that perhaps they're not bothered by what's going on.

What have you come to conclude here?

Do you think that all animals in the queendom feel some semblance of pain?

Yeah, I think

it's a really, really tough question.

You know, pain is unusual in that it's a kind it's like the unwanted sense, right?

It's the thing that it's the thing that we definitely don't want to feel.

It is helpful though, because it does stop us from watching, you know, Star Wars Revenge of the Sith a second time.

So

that's right.

That's more of a kind of emotional pain than the than the more sensory pain that I'm talking about.

But sure, I agree.

The the um

um

now i'm thinking about that movie so

um real bad i'm reliving the pain now why okay um much of the discussion around animal pain has um has revolved around a very very simple question which is can this group of animals feel it yes or no um there have been uh you know there was a time when some people believed that no other animals besides humans could feel pain and then that that uh that

ability was extended to things that are very similar to us, other mammals, birds, maybe.

And then there were a lot of these edge cases, right?

So

there's been for a long time this idea that fish don't feel pain.

I think that that has been refuted by a number of very good studies showing that they very much do.

But here's the thing:

I think that there are probably many different kinds of ways of feeling and experiencing pain.

So we might think, we might look to

the cephalopods, so octopuses and squid,

which are very distant from us,

clearly very intelligent animals.

Do they have the ability to feel pain?

So if you damage the arm of a squid, like if you just cut off the tip of an arm, this is something that happens very often in nature.

The animal does react as if it's in pain in some of the indicators, but crucially, it doesn't seem to behave as if, it doesn't seem to like act as if this arm has been injured, right?

The whole body becomes hypersensitive to stimuli.

It's as if like I stubbed my toe and suddenly like my elbow feels sore or like my neck kind of hurts.

And

it sort of makes sense in the with the biology of a squid, right?

Here is an animal that the arms are actually relatively short and cannot explore most of the body.

So, you know, maybe it's useful for the squid to just behave as if the whole, you know, something is wrong, right?

Octopuses behave in a very different way.

Octopuses have very dexterous long arms that can reach all around the body, including inside themselves.

And if you damage the arm of an octopus, it very much knows that like this arm is hurt.

Like it will cradle that injury.

It will kind of groom it in the way that I would if like my hand was cut or broken.

So, you know, octopuses very much can feel pain.

So here are two animals from the same broad group

that have, I think, radically different experiences of pain.

And I think the same is going to be true across the animal kingdom.

So I said earlier that

we have the kind of eyes that we need.

And I think the same is true for other animals.

They have the kind of sensations of pain that would be useful to them given their

needs, their ecology, their evolutionary history.

So I guess we're in a time when some folks, particularly in the US government, are questioning the value of scientific research, of many different branches of scientific research.

And a lot of the research we've talked about today

is driven by this wonderful curiosity of wanting to know our planet.

And I know you, you mentioned at the beginning of your book, you're like, yeah, there's practical implications, but like for the moment, I don't care.

Like, let's just have fun in this space.

I'm paraphrasing.

No, that's, I accept that.

I'll sign off on that.

But as you do mention, there have been practical implications of what probably started as a scientist just being incredibly curious about how a lobster can see.

And then it ended up having these wider implications in industry and whatnot.

So I think my favorite example that you mentioned in the book

is the oil company that started tracking leaks in pipelines by adding ethylmercaptan,

which is a gas that smells, as you say, of farts and decay, but turkey vultures would also be spotted around it.

And so then you could say, oh, the turkey vultures are around.

We know there's a leak there.

I can give examples where learning about the senses of other animals has led to technological advances, has changed our understanding of our cells.

So, you know, studying the senses of electric fish has been foundational for neuroscience.

But I also don't want to.

And I don't want to because I think it's actually really important to

understand

that the main thing we get out of this and the main reason for knowing about any of it is that the lives of animals have value in their own right.

But I also don't

think that

making

that specific case, that

basic research into the lives of other creatures and what they're capable of,

the idea that that will lead to economic or medical benefits,

I don't think that's at all related to the kinds of events that are currently happening in this country.

I don't think that making that case is going to save the National Science Foundation or any of the other sources of funding that fuel the kind of research that I've talked about in this book.

Because it's not true that what is happening is happening because people don't have a sufficiently good understanding of the value of scientific research.

And, you know, it's also not true that if we just communicated the value of that research better,

whether it's economic or whatever, that we will save science in this country.

What is happening in this country is happening because science is bad for tyrants and always has been.

Like, a populace that has a better understanding of the world around it is a populace that is much harder to rule by fear.

And that is why the scientific infrastructure of this country is currently being sledgehammered to death.

There's no amount of like

making a better case that is going to revert that.

You've got to stop the tyranny, not try and make a better case for why science should exist

yeah

you don't think bringing up examples like how military sonar has been honed by dolphin sonar

i i really don't i really really don't i don't think it's going to make a blind jot of difference no um

you know i think that's i think that's um

I think that's playing the wrong game.

I think that is misdiagnosing the threat and the solution.

And while we are in the world of threats, it's not just tyrants.

Throughout sort of these decades that scientists have been understanding animal senses, there are threats to those senses.

We have light pollution and noise pollution.

and even smell pollution,

which I learned from your book, that's sort of getting in the way of how these animals are perceiving the world.

Can you tell us what's going on with DMS here?

We talked about earlier that gives oceans

that smell of the sea and allows albatrosses to find food.

Yeah, so it turns out, unfortunately, that plastics in the ocean are also a source of DMS inconveniently.

which might be one reason why albatrosses often end up ingesting large chunks of the stuff.

You know, many other sea animals are also drawn towards DMS, like sea turtles.

So this might be one reason why plastic pollution is so harmful to other animals, aside from the fact that it's just everywhere.

Like reading that part of your book to find out that, oh my gosh, plastics are also emitting DMS.

What are the chances that

we've done this and that this is this beacon for birds to find their food.

And gosh, we've really screwed this up, you know.

Yeah.

This is one example about many, and you've touched on other senses too.

You know, we are filling the darkness with light.

We are filling the quiet with noise.

And all of these

extra stimuli that we've added to the world, I don't think we naturally think of them as pollutants,

but they are.

You know, they are things that we have put in the world at times and places where they don't belong and that are harmful to the other creatures that we share the planet with.

I think probably

for us directly, one of the most insidious consequences of pollution is that it severs our relationship with the natural world.

So light at night stops us from seeing the stars and the darkness.

Noise pollution stops us from hearing the calls of birds and other animals around us.

And it makes the natural world seem more impoverished, smaller,

and just more distant from our everyday lives.

So just to cap us off then,

how do you feel you look at the world differently since writing this book?

I've heard you describe it as a salve.

actually to

your feelings.

You know, I wrote a large chunk of this book concurrently with reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic, and

it really helped

my mental health to be spending a lot of my time thinking about

all of these wondrous things that other animals are doing and experiencing all around us.

Thinking about the umwelt of another creature is a lot like going

on and it's a lot like an act of travel,

you know, going to an alien world, traveling to a parallel dimension, or from the comfort of your own

home.

And

it really has been that for me.

I would almost call it escapism, but it's not.

It's actually the opposite of that.

It's an immersion in the true and full reality that we're always

in

and that we miss.

All right.

Oddball questions.

That's how we're going to finish off this interview.

A bunch of

silly lightning round questions.

Let's go.

Maybe there'll be a jingle by the time this comes out.

We'd put it on here.

Ed, what's the most dangerous thing you've done for a book?

I did get hit by a mantis shrimp,

which

has the most powerful punch in nature.

This was a very, very small mantis shrimp.

And it still still hurt

even a large mantis shrimp isn't a big animal yeah right right like a large mantis shrimp is probably like the length of you know close to the length of my forearm probably so it's like substantial you definitely don't want to get hit by one this one was like you know about the size of my pinky and to to like clarify it still hurt you know it didn't not hurt um

so there was that i also got shocked by an electric catfish what was the sound that came out of your mouth mouth, just to give us a sense of the pain level?

You know,

I don't remember.

I can't possibly recreate it for you.

But

yeah, that was a literally shocking thing that I did for the book.

What was your favourite title to a paper that you read while researching this book?

I think blue tits are ultraviolet tits is a great

is just, you know,

very simple.

At least they weren't researching great tits.

That would have been...

Exactly.

That would have been too potent to resist.

Exactly.

Finish this sentence.

Now that I know blank, I'll never look at my blank the same way again.

Now that I know about how dogs smell the world, I'll never look at my dog in the same way again.

And, you know, I wrote this book before I got my dog.

His name is Typo.

And it's completely, it completely changed the, it completely influenced how I thought about his behavior, how I think about dogs in general.

You know, I'm really glad that there wasn't a time in my life when I had a dog, when I was interacting with dogs before

I knew about how they smell the world.

So now, when you go on walks, you'll just let typo smell whatever he wants to smell.

Yeah, we often take him on like sniff walks where we let him dictate the pace, the route, the agenda, as it were.

Funnest object sitting in your house.

Ooh.

A friend of mine sent me a stuffed cicada, like a cicada plushie

during the pandemic.

No, no, not like a taxidermy cicada.

No, like a cicada plushie.

It sort of zips open, like it's like a cicada never zips open and the adult cicada comes out.

That's pretty cool.

Was that supposed to make you feel better during this time?

I don't know.

Maybe that's like some symbolism of metamorphosis emerging from like many years underground into the light final question tell us about a time when you thought you were just talking about science but somehow the dinner party was ruined

um okay i have a very boring answer to this question which is i i i don't have i don't have that I don't have that story for you because I choose my friends really, really carefully.

So I throw the kinds of dinner parties where I can talk about emeralds, cockroach, wasps and umwalt.

Ed Young, thank you so much for your time and thanks for joining us on the show.

Yeah, no worries.

Thanks for having me.

That was science writer Ed Young.

His newest book is called An Immense World.

I'm Wendy Zuckerman and I'll back to you next time.