The bumblebee can't see red, either, but it is sensitive to the ultraviolet hues that lie beyond the opposite end of the rainbow#3980•
The bat's sonar is so acute that it not only finds the spider in the dark but pinpoints it precisely enough to pluck it from its web.#3979•
There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble—Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for "environment," but Uexküll didn't use it simply to refer to an animal's surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world.#3981•
We cannot sense the faint electric fields that sharks and platypuses can. We are not privy to the magnetic fields that robins and sea turtles detect. We can't trace the invisible trail of a swimming fish the way a seal can. We can't feel the air currents created by a buzzing fly the way a wandering spider does.
Our ears cannot hear the ultrasonic calls of rodents and hummingbirds or the infrasonic calls of elephants and whales.
Our eyes cannot see the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes detect or the ultraviolet light that the birds and the bees can sense.#3982•
Lobster eyes have inspired space telescopes, the ears of a parasitic fly have influenced hearing aids, and military sonar has been honed by work on dolphin sonar. These are both reasonable motivations. I'm not interested in either. Animals are not just stand-ins for humans or fodder for brainstorming sessions.#3985•