Ed Yong’s “An Immense World” Probes What We Can Learn from the Creatures Around Us
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Throughout the dark days of our pandemic, readers have turned to The Atlantic’s Ed Yong for his masterful reporting and trenchant analysis, which have netted a Pulitzer Prize and other accolades. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, investigated the surprising structures and rhythms of the microbiome—the amalgam of microbes and their environments and the biochemical give-and-take between them. His sublime new book, An Immense World, delves into animal senses and what they reveal about Umwelt, “the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world.” From shrimp vision to sonar to mosquito tastebuds, Yong’s narrative brims with vivid scenes from laboratories and in the field, astute interviews with researchers across a spectrum of disciplines. Biology geeks will dine out on the rich anecdotes, the historical detours and pithy footnotes, rendered in a witty, crystalline style.
Yong recently discussed the astounding realms of animal sense and the urgent lessons of Covid and climate change with Oprah Daily.
Your book opens with a German noun, Umwelt, which becomes a kind of meme in An Immense World. How would you translate this term for readers?
It literally translates as “environment,” from the German word, but the zoologist who popularized it, Jakob von Uexküll, didn't use it to mean an animal’s physical surroundings. He used it to refer to the part of the surroundings an animal could perceive through its own unique set of senses—the smells and sights and sounds and textures that animal has access to but that other species might not. Each creature has its own particular set of stimuli it can tap into; that blend differs from species to species. Humans have very sharp vision, but we can't see the ultraviolet colors that a bumblebee can. We can't detect the infrared radiation that a rattlesnake can, that allows it to track the heat of warm prey. We can't detect the magnetic field of the earth that a songbird or a sea turtle uses to navigate on its migrations.
Each creature exists within its own sensory bubble, perceiving just a thin sliver of the fullness of reality—that bubble is the Umwelt. It's a term that speaks to the singularity of our subjective experiences and the sheer diversity across the animal kingdom.
An Immense World teems with reporting from around the globe. How did you organize your itinerary and research?
I had a very clear idea of who the protagonists of the book were from the start; and by “protagonists,” I mean both the animals I wanted to feature for their incredible sensory abilities—everything from mosquitoes to rattlesnakes to mantis shrimps—and the scientists who work with those creatures.
I traipsed around California in search of rattlesnakes. I visited sea turtles in a lab in North Carolina. I got electrocuted by an electric catfish. I got punched by a mantis shrimp. I wandered into an arachnarium, a giant hangar full of huge, gear-sized spiders. I got oripulated by a manatee—oripulated is a wonderful word for when these aquatic mammals explore you with their incredibly touch-sensitive lip, like manipulation, but with a mouth instead of a hand.
An Immense World traverses the familiar and unfamiliar facets of our own senses as well as non-human senses such as sonar and electrical fields. And you probe magnetoreception as a kind of “holy grail” for sensory biologists. What do you mean?
Magnetoreception is the ability to sense the earth’s magnetic field. Several animals have this ability—songbirds, sea turtles—which they use to navigate long distances, to guide the path of their migrations. Beyond that, there’s little known about how this sense works—almost uniquely among the senses we don’t know what the sense organ is, we don't know what the receptor is.
With vision, I always see with my eyes; I know exactly which cells in my retinas are responsible for detecting light and processing the signals that go into my brain. I don't know any of those things with magnetoreception. And there are many reasons for that: The magnetic field pervades living flesh, so while most sense organs tend to be on the surface of the body—associated with some kind of orifice, something accessible to the outside world—the receptors that detect magnetic fields don't have to be like that. They could be anywhere. They could be distributed throughout the body. Light and sound are somewhat abstract concepts, but at least I have a feel of what they’re like. I don't have that for a magnetic field, which makes it difficult to appreciate, difficult to study.
That chapter talks a lot about the process of studying magnetoreception. I want readers to understand that it’s not like science is this march of facts. The process is incredibly messy: some stuff that’s discovered ends up not being right. One of the core ideas of the book is that our own senses create boundaries that prevent us from appreciating, or even investigating, the senses of other animals. Magnetoreception is a perfect example—the fact that we have no intuitive sense for magnetic fields not only means that it's hard to appreciate, it also means that the very science is difficult to conduct.
The subtitle of An Immense World is How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. How did you land on realms to describe animal senses?
The dull answer is that we originally had “the hidden world” and didn’t want to repeat “world” twice—“realms” it is! But the deeper idea is that the senses create an incredibly powerful illusion for us, and for everything else. They create this subjective experience of the world that feels all-encompassing, total. Because it is all that we perceive, we mistakenly believe that's all there is to perceive. The Umwelt concept tells us that that isn't true, that there is so much around us that we aren't aware of, and are, in fact, biologically oblivious to. In the book we learn how the plants around us are thrumming with vibrations, songs of insects that feed the plants. They send these beautiful, seismic melodies that are inaudible to us but that insects in the plants can hear. When I walk around my neighborhood with my dog, I become keenly aware of how much I'm missing that his nose can detect. (Typo, bless his heart, is currently sitting outside this room, whining slightly.)
When a fish swims through the water it leaves a trail of turbulent currents that is completely invisible to humans—that we can't feel, despite our sensitive fingertips—but that a seal absolutely can feel with its whiskers. The idea that a body of water could hold a track is crazy to me. But I think it speaks to the “hidden realms” of the subtitle—hidden to us, because of the limitations of our Umwelt, but not hidden to other animals with the right sensory organs.
I have a layman’s interest in genomics and how it’s become a vital tool for decoding the mysteries of life. How will DNA sequencing shape our future?
Before writing this book, I wrote several pieces about how ordinary people are taking the discoveries of the genomic era into their own hands, trying to understand how their own genome influences their health. I think we're approaching a place where that is possible, where sequencing is becoming common enough and cheap enough that it's going to move increasingly out of of laboratories and into people’s lives. I think that could be radically transformative but may require a much deeper understanding of what genes actually do, how they influence our health and behavior and so on.
Our social understanding of these issues lags behind our technological capacity. There's a common thread here that runs through this topic, my pandemic reporting, and An Immense World: Technology gets us a certain distance, but there's a huge and profound chasm that can only be leapt by our moral imagination—the tech doesn't solve our problems; it only brings us a little closer.
I’ve pored over your Covid coverage. Here’s my two-pronged question: Why do we keep getting this pandemic wrong, and how can epidemiologists and our public-health experts do better?
Why we keep getting this wrong is a vast problem; I could write multiple other books on it. But my quick thesis: The U.S. had a lot of vulnerabilities from the start—it had a frayed social-safety net, it had a brittle healthcare system, its public health system had suffered from decades of underinvestment. But it also had this strong sense of almost toxic individualism, which is contrary to what you need to deal with a pandemic, or any of the biggest problems of our time, such as climate change. These can only be solved through collective, community action, which is the essence of public health.
But time and again, we’ve seen policy makers and even public health voices promote the most individualistic core solutions—I think that's a lot of why we fail. We also prize the wrong things. In the pandemic, we prioritized the products of the biomedical industry like vaccines and drugs, which—don't get me wrong—are great. But they are just products. A vaccine is useless without vaccination, and vaccination is a system: It relies on social cohesion, on trust. To make a vaccination appointment, you need the time and freedom to do it. You need to be not working an hourly paid, low-income job that stops you from taking time away to safeguard your own health.
We also underinvested in things like paid sick leave, better ventilation for everyone; instead we focused on vaccinations. To the extent that we concentrated on things that could protect multiple people, like masks, all the messaging was individualistic, about personal risk. The problem with this approach is that epidemics flow downward into society’s cracks, affecting the most marginalized the most, while medical interventions rise upward into society’s penthouses. The people with the most power and money and privilege get earliest and easiest access to them; and then, having gotten access to them, they decide the problem is over. This cycle repeats again and again—it's the theory of fundamental causes, and why elites always move on from the problem before it's actually solved. It's why the same groups that were marginalized in this pandemic are those that face the burden of every other infectious disease, even when medical progress is ostensibly made. We have all these weaknesses—societal, infrastructural, psychological—that made us vulnerable to Covid when it first arrived, and continue to make us vulnerable now.
I'm in the process of thinking though what the solution to all of this is, and one thing I will say is that we see again and again, through history, that elites—whether the media or policy makers or big institutions—tend to fail eventually for this reason: They get safe early, and then they move on. The result is a public health infrastructure that has faced decades of underinvestment, that’s probably weaker now than at the start of the pandemic. You have this horrible bind where it's clear that public health must grapple with some of society's most intractable problems, from racism to poverty. But how can it do that when it's so incredibly weak right now? I think the only answer is to build coalitions, to create alliances with groups of people who might not even think of themselves as working in public health. Many grassroots groups have arisen over the course of the pandemic, representing those who have faced the biggest burden of Covid. There are labor unions. There are bold veteran activist groups—all the people who acted up in ACT UP. All of these groups have power together, and I think that they can create what public health hasn't had for a long time: a viable, powerful constituency.
Your reporting on Covid has addressed monumental and pressing issues, such as inequity in healthcare. To go full circle on you: Umwelt is such an awesome word and could apply beyond the natural world, to, say, inequity, political tribalism, and so on. How do we transcend our own social Umwelt to forge a better future? Or is tribalism our future?
To me, it’s about not being able to see what is out there—not being able to step into the heads, in one case, of another species, but in another case, other people. Both of these things are catastrophic failures of empathy and perspective. In both of those spheres, I think the solutions are the same. To a degree, data helps. If you look at opinion polling, what you see is a very different picture from what we're told is happening. If you look at the results of experiments on what animals are doing, you can see that they are perceiving the world in a very different way. As we said, the tech bit is only part of it. The other part is a leap of imagination, and it's necessary—with the Umwelt stuff, you need these informed imaginative leaps to put yourself in the mind of another animal. You have to do that because the science will only take you part of the way. With the pandemic, you need an act of moral imagination to understand what a better world might be like. We're just trapped in this feeling that this is all there is, and that a return to normal—2019—is all that's available to us.
But it's not. We actually can have a world in which fewer people die of infections, not just Coviod but everything else that affects everyone along the same axes of privilege and marginalization. There’s so much work, trying to get us to think about that possibility. Even when things look dire, there's always a thread of hope—because we need to imagine a better world if we're going to take even the most tentative steps toward it.
The book’s last act shifts to a battle cry on climate change and the rising tide of species extinctions. Are we up to the challenges ahead?
I think the challenges are substantial, and I don't know if we can mount the collective will to address them. At the end of the book, I talk about sensory pollution. The light and sounds that we have flooded into the world, disrupting the senses of other animals—in some ways, this is obvious and actually an easier problem to fix than the larger problem of climate change.
I've written recently about how a lot of these problems are basically the same: Climate change makes pandemics more likely; pandemics hit places with weak healthcare systems harder; the sixth mass extinction of wildlife interacts with climate change to make pandemic risk greater. With every species that goes extinct, we lose a way of perceiving the world, and our world shrinks. Our ability to care for others becomes more impoverished.
I think these are all aspects of the same mega-problem. The logistical solutions differ, but the underlying necessity is the same. We need to start acting collectively. We need to work from a place of empathy with each other, and with other species. Above all, we still need hope— to believe that it’s possible to fix these things. Because it is.
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