Book Review: An Immense World - How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us by Ed Yong ★★★☆☆

This is a detailed examination of the various senses possessed by animals. Some will be intimately familiar to you - like sight and sound - whereas some will seem strange and uncanny - like magnetic detection and electro-sensing. Some straddle an almost understandable space like echolocation or tetra-chromatic vision. This isn't a game of Top Trumps where all the animals are ranked by power. Instead there's a gentle and passionate exploration of what these senses might mean to their owners. It is refreshingly candid about what we don't know, while always trying to convey a sense of wonder about the inherent Umwelt experienced by the animal. But goodness me is it long. It seems that every time the editor told the author to cut out a paragraph, he stuck it in a footnote instead. The text is well referenced, but so are the footnotes, which means occasionally encountering sentences formatted like this: Despite several frustrating false leads, nobody’s ever found them.fn11,36,37,38,39…