Apurva

“There are animals with eyes on their genitals, ears on their knees, noses on their limbs, and tongues all over their skin. Starfish see with the tips of their arms, and sea urchins with their entire bodies.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“This smorgasbord of eyes brings with it a dizzying medley of visual Umwelten. Animals might see crisp detail at a distance, or nothing more than blurry blotches of light and shade. They might see perfectly well in what we’d call darkness, or go instantly blind in what we’d call brightness. They might see in what we’d deem slow motion or time-lapse. They might see in two directions at once, or in every direction at once. Their vision might get more or less sensitive over the span of a single day. Their Umwelt might change as they get older. Jakob’s colleague Nate Morehouse has shown that jumping spiders are born with their lifetime’s supply of light-detecting cells, which get bigger and more sensitive with age. “Things would get brighter and brighter,” Morehouse tells me. For a jumping spider, getting older “is like watching the sun rising.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“To perceive the world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity, and the sacred in the mundane.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Dogs have a facial muscle that can raise their inner eyebrows, giving them a soulful, plaintive expression. This muscle doesn’t exist in wolves. It’s the result of centuries of domestication, in which dog faces were inadvertently reshaped to look a bit more like ours. Those faces are now easier to read, and better at triggering a nurturing response.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us