What Senses Do Animals Have

"Stunning illustrations combined with fascinating facts reveal the ways animals sense their environment. Easy experiments show kids how to compare animal senses to their own" Cf. Our choice, 1999-2000.

Animals have senses just like we do, but their senses work much differently than ours. Birds eyes don’t move at all and some insects use their feet to smell things! Find out about the unique ways in which animals use their senses in this fact-filled e-book! High-interest text paired with colorful images and graphics fill the pages of this e-book to engage students from cover to cover. Encourage students to apply what they’ve learned in the text by completing the “Think Like a Scientist” activity, that supports STEM instruction, included at the end of the e-book. A helpful glossary, table of contents, and index are also included for additional support.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A “thrilling” (The New York Times), “dazzling” (The Wall Street Journal) tour of the radically different ways that animals perceive the world that will fill you with wonder and forever alter your perspective, by Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Ed Yong “One of this year’s finest works of narrative nonfiction.”—Oprah Daily ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time, People, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Slate, Reader’s Digest, Publishers Weekly, BookPage ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Globe and Mail, The New Yorker, Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal The Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. In An Immense World, Ed Yong coaxes us beyond the confines of our own senses to 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. Funny, rigorous, and suffused with the joy of discovery, An Immense World takes us on what Marcel Proust called “the only true voyage . . . not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes.”

I wanted to know what they were experiencing, and why to us they feel so compelling, and so-close. This time I allowed myself to ask them the question that for a scientist was forbidden fruit: Who are you? Weaving decades of field observations with exciting new discoveries about the brain, Carl Safina's landmark book offers an intimate view of animal behavior to challenge the fixed boundary between humans and nonhuman animals. In Beyond Words, readers travel to Amboseli National Park in the threatened landscape of Kenya and witness struggling elephant families work out how to survive poaching and drought, then to Yellowstone National Park to observe wolves sort out the aftermath of one pack's personal tragedy, and finally plunge into the astonishingly peaceful society of killer whales living in the crystalline waters of the Pacific Northwest. Beyond Words brings forth powerful and illuminating insight into the unique personalities of animals through extraordinary stories of animal joy, grief, jealousy, anger, and love. The similarity between human and nonhuman consciousness, self-awareness, and empathy calls us to re-evaluate how we interact with animals. Wise, passionate, and eye-opening at every turn, Beyond Words is ultimately a graceful examination of humanity's place in the world.

Imagine being able to taste or hear with your feet, or feel your way through the dark with your nose! Like humans, animals interact with the world through their senses. Unlike humans, many animals use their senses in truly unique ways to communicate, reproduce, and survive.

Humans have five senses. But some animals can perceive things we can't thanks to their extraordinary senses. From science writer Rebecca E. Hirsch comes a fascinating book that introduces these animals and delves into the science behind their senses. Discover how animals use their senses to find food, navigate their environment, and communicate. Featured animals include the star-nosed mole with its highly developed nose, the deadly sidewinder rattlesnake which uses its pits to strike its prey, and the electric eel that uses electroreception to sense its prey.

Martin Stevens explores the extraordinary variety of senses in the animal kingdom, and discusses the cutting-edge science that is shedding light on these secret worlds. Our senses of vision, smell, taste, hearing, and touch are essential for us to respond to threats, communicate and interact with the world around us. This is true for all animals - their sensory systems are key to survival, and without them animals would be completely helpless. However, the sensory systems of other animals work very differently from ours. For example, many animals from spiders to birds can detect and respond to ultraviolet light, to which we are blind. Other animals, including many insects, rodents, and bats can hear high-frequency ultrasonic sounds well beyond our own hearing range. Many other species have sensory systems that we lack completely, such as the magnetic sense of birds, turtles, and other animals, or the electric sense of many fish. These differences in sensory ability have a major bearing on the ways that animals behave and live in different environments, and also affect their evolution and ecology. In this book, Martin Stevens explores the remarkable sensory systems that exist in nature, and what they are used for. Discussing how different animal senses work, he also considers how they evolve, how they are shaped by the environment in which an animal lives, and the pioneering science that has uncovered how animals use their senses. Throughout, he celebrates the remarkable diversity of life, and shows how the study of sensory systems has shed light on some of the most important issues in animal behaviour, physiology, and evolution.

This fascinating book will thrill children with interesting facts, like how crickets hear with their legs, how bats and dolphins use echolocation, how elephants hear low-frequency sounds, and how sharks use their lateral line for sensing movement in water. This book, illustrated with magnificent photographs, is more interesting than a science-fiction novel!