Bodley Head
THERE was a time when Qualia the octopus would have been as game as any of her kind to show off her famed party trick of unscrewing a jar to get at the tasty crab inside. Not any more, although she is still capable of doing it and her appetite for crabs remains. So what’s up?
To understand the behaviour of Qualia and myriad other animals, Pulitzer prize-winning author Ed Yong invites us on a tour of their sensory worlds.
The central idea of his new book is explained by its subtitle: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us. Yong’s focus is the wide diversity in the way creatures perceive their surroundings through their very different sensory apparatus.
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To describe this sensory world, he borrows from Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll, who coined the term Umwelt to describe not just an animal’s environment, but also its experience of that environment. This differs profoundly between species, from the electric fields bees sense around flowers, to the vibrations spiders feel in their webs.
For Yong, this is more than an intellectual fascination: attempts to imagine the experiences of the creatures around us prompt a shift in our relationship to them. Even the random darting of a fly gains new meaning when we know that its movements are responses to changes in temperature and to currents we will never detect – and would be too slow to react to even if we could. The attitude of superiority that humans have towards most other species becomes harder to justify as you learn more.
“Animals are not just stand-ins for humans or fodder for brainstorming sessions,” says Yong, distancing his interests from those that motivate many others, such as developing biomimetic technologies or using animal models in research. Animals “have worth in themselves. We’ll explore their senses to better understand their lives.”
As for Qualia, it is tempting to liken her behaviour to that of a jaded diva who refuses to perform. But it might be that she couldn’t see past the glass to the crab in the jar in the first place, and was just playing with it out of curiosity until she – or her arms – tired of it.
And there’s an extraordinary thing: an octopus’s arms literally have minds of their own. Of the 500 million-odd neurons in the nervous system of an octopus – comparable to that of a small mammal – only a third are in its head. The rest are in its arms, where they form clusters, or ganglions, on every sucker. Each ganglion connects to a central ganglion that links to its neighbours along the arm “like a string of fairy lights”, says Yong.
Misreading an octopus’s party trick or a fly’s frantic movements are far from the only outcomes of a general failure to grasp the way animals see the world we share and our underappreciation of how they exist in their own world.
The book ends with a warning. Yong describes the countless ways we mould our environment to suit us, often oblivious to the havoc we cause for other species. A window isn’t just confusing for a wasp trying to find its way outside, as its smooth surface returns echoes unlike any in nature, confounding creatures that rely on sound and different kinds of echolocation.
From insects gathering under street lights to the trees no longer propagated by seed-spreading jays, which have been scared off by artificial noise, our impact is disturbing and, in many ways, still unknown.
“Sensory pollution is the pollution of disconnection,” says Yong, as he describes how we are drowning out the stimuli that birds, fish and insects rely on to connect with each other and their surroundings. “That must now change,” he adds. “We have to save the quiet, and preserve the dark.”
