[mycologos]

If you're a layperson interested in these sensory questions, I highly recommend the book An Immense World by Ed Yong. It's a 400-something page tour through the many senses animals have and we (mostly) don't. It might have the highest density of truly cool animal facts per page of anything I've ever read, despite being written for adults who maybe haven't considered themselves the audience for fun animal facts in decades.

[pants2]

I'll have to check this out. I thoroughly enjoyed Sensory Exotica by Howard Hughes which does a deep dive into four extraordinary senses: biosonar, biological compasses, electroperception, and chemical communication

[cactusplant7374]

Which fact did you find the most interesting?

[mycologos]

"Most" is pretty hard, so I'll just pick one I think is good. I'm paraphrasing here, so errors are mine.

Sea otters, which feed themselves through long dives to and from the ocean floor, with a blind and hurried pawing for urchins in the middle, have hands that are about as sensitive as human hands, but significantly faster. Tasked with distinguishing boards with slightly different small ridges, humans compare and re-compare before deciding; if an otter touches the correct board first, it doesn’t touch the second one at all. This is true even though a human fingertip, if inflated to the size of the earth, is sensitive enough to distinguish between cars and houses. A manatee’s face is about as good.

[pixelmonkey]

+1, a truly great book.