How to Smell like a Dog, with Ed Yong

I did get hit by a mantis shrimp, which has the most powerful punch in nature. This was a very, very small mantis shrimp, and it still hurt. Do-do-do, science chats with our favorite nerds. Yeah! Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman, and you're listening to Science Versus. Today on the show, the amazing superpowers of animals. Some animals can see things that we can't see. They can hear things that we can't hear, touch things that we will never feel. And so today on the show, we are diving into their world to talk about the groundbreaking science of how animals perceive. And to go on this journey, we'll be chatting to Ed Yong. He's a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer, and we'll be talking about how animals perceive. We'll be talking about his book, An Immense World, How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. And I think you're going to love this chat. You are going to look at your dog in a totally different light by the end of this chat. You're going to appreciate how eyes have literally painted the world. And you may even feel sorry for the humble cockroach. If you are listening to this on Spotify, you can also be watching it because it's on video. Hello. Hello. Hello. This interview with Ed Yong is coming up just after the break. Gray roots entering the chat. Uninvited? Garnier's got you. Garnier Color Sensation Root Retouch covers up to 100% of grays in just 10 minutes. No ammonia, no mess, and the color lasts up to four weeks. It's as easy to apply as shampoo. Plus, it's vegan and cruelty-free. 10 minutes. Sensational color. Original price. With those savings, your next girl's night is basically free. Find your perfect match at walmart.com or at a store near you. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? ZepBound Terzepatide may be able to help. ZepBound is a prescription medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity. Or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off. ZepBound is approved as a 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, or 15 milligram injection. ZepBound contains terzepatide and should not be used with other terzepatide-containing products or any GLP-1 receptor agonist medicines. It is not known if ZepBound is safe and effective for use in children. Don't share needles or pens or reuse needles. Don't take if allergic to it. Or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer. Or if you've had multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Tell your doctor if you get a lump or swelling in your neck. Stop ZepBound and call your doctor if you have severe stomach pain or a serious allergic reaction. Severe side effects may include inflamed pancreas or gallbladder problems. Tell your doctor if you experience vision changes before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. If you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking ZepBound with a sulfonylurea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-5979 or visit ZepBound.Lily.com. Welcome back today on the show, the wonderful Ed Yong. Hi, Ed. Welcome to the show. Hello. Yeah, thanks for having me. In your book, you say that sort of regardless of our technology or intellect, we are really perceiving only a thin fraction of all there is to perceive. Our sense of the world is an illusion. Yes. So tell me more about that. Every creature has its own particular ways of sensing the world, its own set of sights and sounds and smells and textures that it has access to. So we're all trapped in our own little sensory bubbles. And there is a wonderful word for such a bubble. That word is umwelt. It's just German for environment, but it has a very special meaning in this context. And it's one of my favorite ideas in all of biology because it tells us that no matter where we are and no matter which kind of living thing we are, we really are only experiencing a tiny fraction of all there is to experience. It's such a lovely. It's such a lovely idea as we're walking around in the world to think about what else is there. What else could I be seeing or perceiving if I was a different animal? Yeah, I agree. I think it means that there's so much wonder to be had everywhere. If you, you know, dive into water, depending on the part of the world you're in, you might be surrounded by the electric fields generated by fish that can make their own electricity. You'll be surrounded by turbulent currents that are left behind by swimming animals that you won't be able to feel. You'll be suffused by the magnetic fields of the earth itself, which you won't be able to detect. There's all of this stuff, all these signals around us that we don't perceive and that other animals do. Electric fish can detect each other's signals. Seals can detect the tracks left behind by swimming fish. Sea turtles can detect the magnetic fields of the earth itself. Yeah. And now I want to move through some of the senses. And one of the things that perhaps we get wrong about ourselves, which is the sense of smell. I think we have this idea that humans don't have a great sense of smell. I think this sort of evolutionary chit-chat that you hear, this sort of story I guess I've heard since primary school is like, now we are visual. We're visual creatures and we don't really use our smell. It's been thrown off to the side. But is that entirely true? How bad is a human's sense of smell? Yeah, it's actually all right. I'm not going to tell you that our sense of smell is as good as, say, an elephant's or a dog's. They have hardware that we don't have. Humans really aren't too bad at it. We have decent noses. We can smell a lot of different kinds of chemicals. We can detect some of them at concentrations that rival championships like dogs. And in your book, you did a fun experiment involving getting on all fours. Tell me about it. Yes. So I went to see a woman named Alexandra Horowitz who studies dogs, dog cognition, a dog's sense of smell. She got a length of string that had been, scented with chocolate and she laid it on the floor. And my task was to, with a blindfold on, follow the path of the string. So I got down on all fours and I sniffed at the string and I did basically what a dog does, which is to swing your head left and right while you're sniffing. And by doing this, you can follow the path of the string. And I did. And two things. First, it took a long time. And second, I was hyperventilating as I was doing it because I am not like, we are not used to just going. Right. Because the way our noses work, every time you blow, every time you exhale, you lose that perception of whatever you're smelling. So you have to just repeatedly, if you're doing that many times in a row, you start. It's not good. So why doesn't that happen to dogs? Why could dogs keep going? So dogs can do it for a bunch of different reasons. And Alexandra's dog, Finn, did the same task, followed the string much more accurately, much more quickly. He was doing it in fractions of a second, in what took me many minutes and with no effort. He does that for a couple of reasons. So when a dog breathes in, that airstream is cleaved into two by structures. Inside its skull. So there's a large stream of air that goes down into the lungs and is for breathing. And then there is another smaller stream that goes to a chamber in the back of the snout that is dedicated for smell and smell alone. So there's this constant influx of like scented air into the part of the dog's head that is responsible for processing smell. That's not what happens in us. The dog, it's just getting this constant conveyor belt of scented air going into its nose, whether it's on the inside, or the inhale or the exhale. And again, that means that its experience of smell is not this strobing, flickering thing that I am having to fight against. It's continuous. You know, I like to think of it as closer to our experience of vision, right, where we have, even though we're blinking all the time, we don't, you know, our view of the world doesn't black out. It's smooth. It's continuous. And why do they love the smell of a human? and crotch. what um i think uh so i think that is also related to what how dogs interact with each other right so what happens when two dogs meet um they sniff each other right and they sniff each other usually in the groin they'll do that like that like cool yin yang thing where they're both sniffing each other's groins that's because um all animals to various degree are just leaking sacks of chemicals right we are just like uh spewing molecules into the world around us all the time whether we like it or not and we do it especially um you know from like moist membranes more than other places so like our breath our groins armpits um and these uh and you know for us as we've said we don't go around sniffing each other in any of these areas um dogs do because to them smell uh provides many clues about the other in the individual that they're meeting right smell provides clues about identity but also about things like age health diet now tell me about this remarkable chemicals that you've been using for a long time yeah so this chemical is called uh dimethyl sulfide or dms um it smells kind of seaweedy a little oystery it's the it's the smell of the sea um we've talked about how there's been this long-standing myth that human sense of smell is terrible equally there has been this very long-standing myth that birds uh do not smell at all um it's a lie um birds do smell uh many of them smell very very well and seabirds like albatrosses are some of them um dms is one of the things that they are paying attention to so when there's a ton of uh creole munching down on a ton of plankton under the surface of the water when there's just a lot of life out there that releases a ton of dms it's so cool it's like an oven with cookies baking and you're like yes yeah exactly like that exactly like that and um to a bird with a right nose like an albatross um the scent of dms reveals the parts of the ocean that are richest in life and so richest in food what i love about this is um that the ocean seems completely featureless to us right the the open ocean is just this flat landscape it's two-dimensional um it looks kind of boring um to that is what it looks like to our eyes to the nose of an albatross foraging over the ocean it's very three-dimensional it has these mountains and valleys of dms and other scents that give the bird an idea of what's going on beneath the surface of the water it's not flat it's not featureless and it only is that way to our umbelt but not those of a bird like an albatross from smell? to sight um so the amazingness of the human eye is often used by creationists to say that god must have created the world because evolution can't create such a complex structure and as you write in the book darwin himself wasn't sure how complicated human eyes could have evolved and writing in the origin of species that to suppose the eye had been formed quote by natural selection seems i freely confess absurd in the highest possible degree but he did say as well that if we could find other versions of the eye like sort of crappier gradations like if we could see the sort of beginnings of the human eye and then in in other animals maybe that would suggest it was evolution which is sort of funny because that's how the pyramids are people see the beautiful pyramids of giza but there's crappier ones down the road you know they see the pyramids and they're like aliens must have done it and it's like well it's because you didn't see the crappier ones that they went you know before they perfected that's right all right like the beta test pyramids before we landed on this like deluxe model yeah right so um when you look through the animal queendom do you see the variations of what might become the human eye yeah you absolutely do um uh and you know dar darwin can darwin can relax um we we have we have it sorted um so yeah uh there are actually um animals with every possible degree of eye um the simplest eye really is just um a single photoreceptor so it's a single cell that is sensitive to light um that can con that where light uh light triggers a chemical change in the cell which leads to an electrical signal being sent and that cell can detect the presence of light once you're sensitive to light once you can detect it then you can add things like a little bit of pigment if you have pigment on one side it creates shade and now you can not only detect light but work out where it's coming from when you have lots of those um clustered together then not only can you detect where light is coming from but you now start have you start to have the very rudimentary image like with very few pixels but an image nonetheless then you can add an element on top of that a lens that helps to focus the light to give you extra acuity the point is you can actually very easily see how an eye can build up over time from something that is really unlike an eye at all um that doesn't take a lot of generations to actually um happen and we have organisms that have every possible step along the way and i think it also um actually um animals get the get the kinds of sense organs they need and eyes that are you know quote unquote worse than ours exist because their owners don't need to do anything fancier um you know an eagle has an incredible eye because an eagle is soaring at great heights and trying to detect rabbits at large distances um a starfish um has a considerably worse eye because a starfish is not doing that all the starfish needs to do is to find the shady shelter of a reef and you know that's one of the reasons why the starfish is the most dangerous species in the world scuttle into some crevice somewhere i don't want to fall into that trap of to say that we are at the top to say that we are at the top to say that we are at the top of the some evolutionary pinnacle it's all of the some evolutionary pinnacle it's all of the some evolutionary pinnacle it's all just a beautiful rainbow sure yeah and then just a beautiful rainbow sure yeah and then just a beautiful rainbow sure yeah and then when we just to really land the point when we just to really land the point when we just to really land the point that you know humans are not at the that you know humans are not at the that you know humans are not at the pinnacle of the eye pinnacle of the eye pinnacle of the eye evolutionary story um when we think of evolutionary story um when we think of evolutionary story um when we think of color color color humans can you know most humans can see humans can you know most humans can see humans can you know most humans can see the colors of the rainbow but lots of the colors of the rainbow but lots of the colors of the rainbow but lots of animals can see in ultraviolet light so animals can see in ultraviolet light so animals can see in ultraviolet light so beyond beyond beyond the purple or violet um right the purple or violet um right the purple or violet um right can you help us imagine can you help us imagine can you help us imagine the world of ultraviolet light whether it's how our world would look different from birds and flowers. Yeah, so flowers are a great place to start. So many flowers have evolved to attract animals like bees and hummingbirds and other pollinators, almost all of which can see ultraviolet. And if you can see ultraviolet, you can see many signals on flowers that human eyes miss. So sunflowers, for example, just look yellow to us, but they have this beautiful ultraviolet halo in the middle of them. Many other flowers have things like this, these like bull's eyes and like landing strips, I think of them as signs that attract pollinators to the flower. Birds also, you know, all birds can see ultraviolet to a different extent. And if you can see ultraviolet, you can see patterns on the feathers of birds that, again, our eyes miss. Here in the US, the American robin has a famously red breast. Males and females both have red breasts. The sexes are a little bit hard to tell apart in this bird. But to us, the birds have no problem because the male's breast blazes with ultraviolet as well as red. The female's does not. So robins can easily tell them apart, tell each other apart. And then that's just, you know, ultraviolet as color in and of itself. You can also blend ultraviolet with other colors. So most people have eyes with three kinds of color-sensing cells, let's call them. They're called cone cells. They're the ones responsible for our color vision. And my dog has only two. So his rainbow is much more limited than mine. Birds have four. So their rainbows are just so much more expansive. A typical bird can probably see about 100 times more colors than what we can perceive, which is just stunning to me because so many birds are already just shockingly colorful and beautiful. Like, take the most colorful bird that you can imagine and now try and imagine that that bird has, you know, maybe 100 times more colors on it to another bird. than what you are. currently seeing it's amazing it's like stop it at that point you're like stop it you know i know right like enough please yeah did you have to wear that to the met gala like did you you know um yeah so now let's look at sounds and hearing um in the 1960s researchers got hold of this amazing recording of an animal that ultimately became this huge cultural phenomenon inspiring a star trek movie um also an entire animal rights movement um can you tell me about this yeah um so we're talking about whales um and um uh whales pretty the the and we're talking about the really big whales too so things like blue whales fin whales the largest animal that exist and have ever existed um they communicate with each other um with uh infrasound um so that's sound that's too low for the human ear to detect and sounds that travels over very very very large distances um in the ocean um a blue whale's call could conceivably traverse the entire span of say the atlantic which is crazy crazy to think about it is it is absolutely crazy so there were definitely there were definitely cases where you could have a whale calling off the coast of europe and detect that call with a hydrophone an underwater microphone um off the coast of the u.s um when the navy first picked up these kinds of sounds um they were uh you know they didn't know what to make of them um and eventually they the sounds to their sources which were very large whales like blue and fin whales i think it's still an open question of whether whales are really communicating over those kinds of distances right so you know is a whale off the coast of europe having a chat with a whale off the coast of the u.s it seems like implausible right those messages would take maybe half an hour or so to move across that distance um but um maybe another animal superpower that you talk about is echolocation which is this amazing ability of bats and dolphins to use echo to find their way and their prey but in the book you met a person who can echolocate tell us about that yeah so his name is daniel kish um he is one of several human echolocators um so he is blind and he has been blind since a very close relationship close to his first birthday and um he uh navigates through the world with a cane as many blind people do but also by making these very loud clicks with his tongue um so if i try to click with my tongue the noise is kind of pathetic and wet and muffled his is like much closer to me snapping with my fingers it's sharp it's loud produces a very strong echo he does this as he moves about his neighborhood and he does this as he moves around his neighborhood and he does this as he moves about and i went on a walk with him and daniel is incredibly independent the cane helps of course but with his echolocation he can tell when we're walking past a house a car um a lawn you know whether there's a fence next to us how would he just from it sounds a little different the texture of the grass is different from the texture of concrete or texture of pavement um uh he can tell you know when uh there's a tree a branch blocking his path um you know a fence he can tell whether it's uh like chain link or slatted um were you walking with him and testing him like obviously no no he's just narrating like you know i'm just walking along he's narrating at some point there's a branch across our path and i duck and i forget to say hey daniel there's a branch and he gets it like he knows um the the word echolocation was actually defined in a paper that was about bats and he was like oh my god i don't know what i'm doing i don't know what i'm doing i don't know and humans um and everyone kind of forgot the the human bits and the the human bits and it you know a lot of people know that bats can do this so what bats are doing is that they are releasing very very high pitched ultrasonic calls too high for us to hear they're doing it at often incredible speeds up to a couple of hundred times a second and they're listening for those echoes bouncing off um objects in the world around them and by timing how long it takes for the sound to go out and to return the bat can translate that time um into distance amazing daniel is basically doing exactly the same thing um his clicks are not ultrasonic like those of a bat um so they provide a little less information to him but it's basically the same thing he is using the timing of rebounding sound to map the world around him how did it feel to be walking with him so um it felt it felt amazing it is very easy to um watch daniel and to think of this as some kind of superpower but like every way of sensing the world um it has some strengths and it has drawbacks too it's really bad for anything that involves a small thing against a large thing so if i wanted to hide from daniel i would stand right up against a wall and the thing is bats also suffer from this problem bats really can easily detect a moth in air but if the moth is sitting on a leaf um most bats will really struggle to find it so one of my favorite stories that daniel told me is that um he was once asked to try and tell um the difference between two objects that to him sounded exactly the same one was a stuffed bear like a teddy bear and the other was a champagne bottle and those obviously look different to us but they both distort and muffle echoes in different ways so the champagne bottle has all these curves to it which send the sound bouncing off in random directions the teddy bear is very soft and fluffy so it's absorbing and like doing the same kinds of things to the sound so so both of those are returning very bad uninformative echoes interesting so they basically sound kind of the same after the break how an impeccable sense of touch can help turn a cockroach into a zombie did you know that 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Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Imagine being a million miles away. Explore the possibilities. Ask your doctor about Trimfiya. Tap this ad to see new joint data and learn more about Trimfiya, including important safety information. Welcome back. I'm here with Pulitzer Prize winning science writer, Ed Yong. Then on to touch. So animals use touch and vibrations in all sorts of exciting ways. But I think one of my favorites from your book was the emerald jewel wasp, which when I saw a picture of it, it's a gorgeous wasp. Oh, it's stunning. Yeah. Right. Inch long, metallic, turquoise body. It looks like it's wearing orange bike shorts, kind of. Yes. Yes, it does. Yeah. I mean, the metallic green and orange combo is really working for it. I also want that combo. It's a combo I'm not sure I could get away with, but it's, yeah. No, right. So tell us how she uses touch. The emerald cockroach wasp is a parasite that lays eggs inside the bodies of still living cockroaches. Yeah. The young wasp hatches from those eggs and then basically eats the cockroach alive. Right. So nom, nom, nom. It turns into an adult wasp. It bursts out. It flies away. It finds its own cockroach. The horrible cycle repeats. It's a special kind of parasite because it also manipulates the mind and the behavior of its host. So the wasp's sting not only lays an egg, but it also delivers venom to the cockroach's body. The wasp's brain that changes its behavior. It makes it very docile. And, you know, we all know cockroaches are threatened. They run away very easily. But once stung, the cockroach becomes very, very amenable. So the wasp actually grabs it by its antennae and leads it to its nest like a person walking a dog. It really does. We actually have a video and it really does look like it's just walking this cockroach. The cockroach is a lot bigger than the wasp, like a dog. It's crazy. It's wild. It really does. Now, where touch comes in is how does the wasp know where to inject venom? Right. So it's stung the cockroach. The tip of the sting is full of touch sensors. So the sting not only is an electric drill, but it's also kind of like a hand, right? It's an organ of touch. And the wasp can detect the texture, the shape maybe of a cockroach brain and uses that as a cue. So it'll go in, like it sees the head, goes in through the carapace. That's right. Yeah. But then it has to feel for the little brain, right? Because it has to feel for the brain. Yeah. Yeah. And there have been some great experiments showing that it's doing this by replacing the cockroach brain with like stuff that feels very different, stuff that feels like a fake brain and seeing what the wasps do. So yeah, the wasp is absolutely using its sense of touch to feel for the distinctive feel of a cockroach brain. One of the last senses I want to look at is pain that you talk about in your book. And you sort of asking this question of whether all other animals feel pain. Writing, caterpillars will continue munching on a leaf while parasitic wasp larvae eat them from the inside out, suggesting that perhaps they're not bothered by what's going on. What have you come to conclude here? Do you think that all animals feel pain? Do all animals in the queendom feel some semblance of pain? Yeah, I think it's a really, really tough question. You know, pain is unusual in that it's a kind, it's like the unwanted sense, right? It's the thing that we definitely don't want to feel. It is helpful, though, because it does stop us from watching, you know, Star Wars Revenge of the Sith a second time. So that's right. That's more of a kind of emotional pain. Than the more sensory pain that I'm talking about. But sure, I agree. Now I'm thinking about that movie. I'm reliving the pain now. Why? Okay. Much of the discussion around animal pain has revolved around a very, very simple question, which is, can this group of animals feel it? Yes or no? Um, there have been, uh, you know, there was a time when some people believed that no other animals besides humans could feel pain. And then that, that, uh, that ability was extended to things that are very similar to us, other mammals, birds, maybe. Um, and then there were a lot of these age group, age cases, right? So there, there was, uh, there's been for a long time, this idea that fish don't feel pain. Um, I think that that has been refuted by a number of very good studies showing that they very much, um, do. But, but here's the thing. Um, I think that, uh, there are probably many different kinds of ways of feeling and experiencing pain. Um, so we might think we might look to, um, the cephalopods, so octopuses and squid, um, which are very distant from us. Um, clearly very intelligent animals. Do they have the ability to feel pain? Um, so if you, um, damage the arm of a squid, like if you just cut off the tip of an arm, this is something that happens very often in nature. Um, the animal, um, does react as if it's in pain is some of the, the indicators, but crucially, it doesn't seem to behave as if it doesn't seem to like act as if this arm is, has been injured, right? The whole body becomes hypersensitive to stimuli. It's as if like I stubbed my toe and suddenly like, my elbow feels sore or like my neck kind of hurts. Um, and it sort of makes sense in the, with the biology of a squid, right? Here is an animal that, um, uh, the arms are actually relatively short and cannot explore most of the body. So, you know, maybe it's useful for the squid to just behave as if the whole, you know, something is wrong, right? Um, octopuses behave in a very different way. Octopuses have very dexterous, long arms that can reach all around the body, including inside themselves. And if you damage the arm of an octopus, it very much knows that like this arm is hurt, like it will cradle that injury. It will kind of groom it in the way that I would if like my hand was, um, cut or broken. Um, so, you know, octopuses very much can feel pain. Um, so here are two animals from the same broad group, um, that have, I think, different experiences of pain. And I think the same is going to be true across the animal kingdom. Um, so I said earlier that we have the, we have the kind of eyes that we need. And I think the same is true for other animals. They have the kind of sensations of pain that would be useful to them given their, uh, their needs, their ecology, their evolutionary history. So I guess we're in a time when some folks, particularly in the US government are questioning the value of scientific research, um, of many different branches of scientific research. And a lot of the research we've talked about today, um, is, is driven by this wonderful curiosity of wanting to know our planet. And I know you, um, you mentioned at the beginning of your book, you're like, yeah, there's practical implications, but like for the moment, I don't care. Like, let's just have fun in this space. I'm paraphrasing. No, that's, I, I accept that. I'll sign off on that. Um, but as you do mention, there have been practical implications of what probably started as a scientist, just being incredibly curious about how a lobster can see. And then it ended up having these wider implications in industry and whatnot. So I think, I think my favorite example that you mentioned in the book. Um, is the oil company that started tracking leaks in pipelines by adding ethyl mercaptan, um, which is a gas that smells, as you say, of farts and decay, but turkey vultures would also be spotted around it. And so then you could say, oh, the turkey vultures are around. We know there's a leak there. I, I can give examples where learning about the senses of other animals has led to technological advances, has, um, changed our understanding of ourselves. So, you know, studying the senses of electric fish. um has been foundational for neuroscience but i also don't want to and i don't want to because i think it's actually really important to um understand that the main thing we get out of this and the main reason for knowing about any of it is that the lives of animals have value in their own right but i also don't um think that making that specific case that um basic research into the lives of other creatures and what they're capable of um the idea that that will lead to economic or medical benefits um i don't think that's at all related to the kind of kinds of events that are currently happening in this country i don't think that making that case is going to save the national science foundation or any of the other sources of funding that fuel the kind of research that i've talked about in this book um because it's not true that what is happening is happening because people don't have a sufficiently good understanding of the value of scientific research and you know it's also not true that if we just communicate to the value of that research we're going to be able to do a lot of good work and we're going to be able to do a lot better whether it's economic or whatever that we will save science in this country what is happening in this country is happening because science is bad for tyrants and always has been like a populace that has a better understanding of the world around it is a populace that is much harder to rule by fear and that is why the scientific infrastructure of this country is currently being sledgehammered to death um there's no amount of like uh making a better case that is going to revert that you got to stop the tyranny not try and make a better case for why science should exist yeah you don't think bringing up examples like how military sonar has been honed by dolphin sonar i really don't i really really don't i don't think it's going to make a blind jotted difference no um you know i think that's i think that's um i think that's playing the wrong game i think that is misdiagnosing the threat and the solution and while we are in the world of threats it's not just tyrants um throughout sort of this these decades that scientists have been understanding animal senses there are threats to those senses we have um light pollution and noise pollution um and even smell pollution uh which i learned from from your book that's sort of getting in the way of how these animals are perceiving the world can you tell us what's going on with dms here we talked about earlier that gives oceans uh that seat that smell of the sea and allows albatrosses to find food yeah so it turns out unfortunately that plastics in the ocean are also a source of dms conveniently which might be one reason why albatrosses um often end up ingesting large chunks of the stuff um you know many other sea animals are also drawn towards dms like sea turtles um so um this might be you know one reason why uh plastic pollution is so harmful to other animals aside from the fact that it's just everywhere like reading that um part of your book to find also emitting dms what are the chances that we that we've done this and that this is this beacon for birds to find their food and gosh we've really screwed this up you know yeah um this is one example about many and you've touched on other senses too um you know we we are filling the darkness with light we are filling the quiet with noise and all of these um extra stimuli that we've added to the world i i don't think we naturally think of them as pollutants um but they are um you know they are things that we have put in the world at times and places where they don't belong and that are harmful to the other creatures that we share the planet with i think probably the what for us directly one of the most insidious consequences of pollution is that it severs our relationship with the natural world it's a light at night stops us from seeing stars and um and the darkness uh noise pollution stops us from hearing the calls of birds and other animals around us and it makes the natural world seem more impoverished smaller um and uh just more distant from our everyday lives so just to um cap us off then do you how do you feel you look at the world differently since writing this book i've heard you describe it as a salve actually to your feelings um you know i wrote large chunks of this book concurrently with reporting on the covet 19 pandemic and um it really helped my um my mental health to be spending a lot of my time thinking about uh all of these wondrous things that other animals are doing and experiencing all around us thinking about the umwelt of another creature is a and is it looked like an act of travel um you know going to an alien world traveling to a parallel dimension or from the comfort of your own um home and it really it really has been that for me i would almost call it escapism but it's not it's it's actually the opposite of that it's it's an immersion in the true and full reality that we're always in um and that we miss all right oddball questions that's how we're going to finish off this interview a bunch of nice okay silly lightning round questions um let's let's go maybe there'll be a jingle by the time this comes out we'd put it on here ed what's the most dangerous thing you've done for a book i did get hit by a mantis shrimp um which uh has the most powerful punch in nature um this was a very very small mantis shrimp and i and it still hurt even a large mantis shrimp isn't a big animal oh right right like a large mantis shrimp is probably like the length of you know close to the length of my forearm probably so it's like substantial you definitely don't want to get hit by one this one was like you know about the size of my pinky and to like clarify it still hurt you know it didn't not hurt um so there was that i also got shocked by an electric catfish what was the sound that came out of your mouth just to give us a sense of the pain level you know i don't i don't remember i i can't possibly recreate it for you but um yeah that was a literally shocking thing that i did for the book um what was your favorite title to a paper that you read while researching this book i think blue tits are ultraviolet tits is a great it's just you know very simple at least they weren't researching great tips that would have been exactly that would have been too potent to resist exactly um finish this sentence now that i know blank i'll never look at my blank the same way again now that i know about how dogs smell the world i'll never look at my dog in the same way again and and you know i wrote this book before i got my dog his name is typo um and uh it's completely it completely changed the it completely um influenced how i thought about his behavior how i think about dogs in general you know i'm really glad that there wasn't a time in my life when i had a dog when i was interacting with dogs before um i knew about how they smell the world so now when you go on walks you'll just let typo smell whatever he wants yeah we often take him on like sniff walks where um we let him dictate the pace the the route the agenda as it were funnest object sitting in your house oh a friend of mine um sent me a stuffed cicada like a cicada plushie um during the pandemic no no not like a taxidermic cicada no like uh like a cicada plushie um it sort of zips open like it's like a cicada nymph zips open and the adult cicada comes out um that's pretty cool um was that supposed to make you feel better during this time i don't know maybe like some symbolism of of metamorphosis emerging from like many years underground into the light final question tell us about a time when you thought you were just talking about science but somehow the dinner party was ruined um okay i have a very boring answer to this question which is i i i don't have i don't have that i don't have that story for you because i choose my friends really really carefully so i throw the kind to dinner parties where I can talk about emerald cockroach wasps and umbalt. Ed Yong, thank you so much for your time and thanks for joining us on the show. Yeah, no worries. Thanks for having me. That was science writer Ed Yong. His newest book is called An Immense World. I'm Wendy Zuckerman and I'll back to you next time. So purchase new carpet from The Home Depot and get it installed at TheHomeDepot.com. Install it for free right now. Shop the stylish choices and simple pricing of carpet from Home Decorators Collection, Traffic Master, or LifeProof with PetProof technology and see for yourself why nobody beats our prices. Enjoy new carpet with free installation right now at The Home Depot. Offer valid October 15th through November 1st, 2026. Exclusions apply. For licenses, see HomeDepot.com slash license numbers. Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. 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