Reconnecting with natural world around us is a vital part of conservation, science writer says

SALT LAKE CITY — Have you ever wondered why your dog will abruptly stop on your walk to smell a patch of grass, or why a snake flicks its tongue in and out of its head? Maybe while watching "Animal Planet" you wonder how a leopard seal could tolerate sitting on an iceberg without freezing.

Ed Yong explained that it has to do with their unique senses.

In a lecture at the National History Museum of Utah Tuesday night, Yong invited the audience to leave behind their preconceived notions of animal behavior and enter his researched world of animal senses.

One way that Yong spends time with his pet corgi Typo is taking him on "scent walks," meaning Typo is in control of every start and stop they take on their walk — not for exercise but for curiosity.

"He gets to choose how long he spends investigating whatever he likes, within reason," Yong said. "And it tends to be that we might spend, say, half an hour just going around one block, we might pause for him to delicately examine every leaf and stem on one fascinating plant."

It not only boosts Typo's mental health but "also reminds me that even when I am in the exact same physical space as my dog, we are perceiving that space in radically different ways. We exist in two very different sensory worlds," he added.

Yong referred to this as "umwelt," the German word for environment. It doesn't just describe one's physical environment, but is the personal and unique combination of "sights and sounds and textures and smells that I can perceive," that someone in the same vicinity may not even be experiencing.

Living in a sliver of reality

Perhaps you've been hit with the phrase "look at the big picture" when trying to understand someone's perspective. According to Yong, no one can see the big picture; in fact, our realities are only a small part of the frame surrounding the picture.

"Obviously, you're not sitting there with holes in your subjective experience of the world; you don't get this sense of gaps in your perception. Nonetheless, those gaps are there sensing that you are completely perceiving what there is to perceive is just an illusion, you're only getting a small part of it," Yong explained.

That is an illusion that all living creatures experience on the earth.

"It tells us that in all the settings around us, including the most familiar ones, our homes and gardens and neighborhoods, there are flickers of magic to be found in the mundane. The extraordinary is always lurking behind the ordinary," he added. "And to understand that extraordinary side of nature that we don't normally tap into, all we have to do is to think about what other creatures are experiencing."

Unique senses within the animal kingdom

Through research for his novel published in 2022 titled, "An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us," Yong discovered that by tapping into the perspectives of animals, humans can drastically broaden their scope of the world around them.

For example, sea turtles and Eurasian robins have an innate sense of the magnetic field of the earth, meaning they're born with natural compasses in their bodies.

"A sea turtle hatching off the coast of Florida will typically head into the ocean and then spend the next decade doing a clockwise loop of the entire Atlantic," Yong said, explaining that if you were to hatch that sea turtle in a laboratory of the coast of Portugal and "expose it to the kinds of magnetic fields, that it might encounter in different parts of that journey, it will also orient as if it were off the coast of Portugal and not off the coast of Florida. And it'll have that ability, even if it has never been in the water before."

If you were to put the Eurasian robin into a completely dark room with nothing to guide it, its innate compass would be able to guide the songbird on its migration route because of its natural magnetic map of the Earth, Yong explained.

The two small pits next to a rattlesnake's snout are used as heat detectors that identify the warmth of small prey within proximity, allowing them to hunt in complete darkness. "The neurons that go from those pit organs eventually wire together those coming from the snake's eyes," Yong said. "And, some scientists believe that the snake effectively sees in heat, and that the body heat is just another color (added) to it on top of the ones that it normally sees."

Rats and mice speak to each other in "ultrasonic duets," meaning the frequency is so high humans cannot pick up on it. According to Yong, if you were to tickle a mouse it would "giggle ultrasonically."

Reconnecting with the natural world

Yong argues that although every species has its limitations, knowing more about the creatures around us allows us to "change how we think about the animals themselves, (and) it expands our knowledge of what they're capable of, of how they live their lives, and often pushes back against stereotypes that we might have about what they're like."

Becoming more aware of the natural world also puts into perspective our responsibilities as humans to respect it.

Yong explained that we often think of climate change and plastic waste as major environmental issues, and while those are relevant and important, we often forget that light and noise are also pollutants:

"We have flooded the darkness with light and quiet with noise. And in doing so we have made the world less hospitable for many of the animals around us," Yong said.

"We cause harm, we pull migrating birds away from the already arduous journeys, we yank baby sea turtles away from the ocean onto roads and towns where they often die. We distract pollinating insects away from the plants ... Under these contexts, light is a pollutant," Yong said.

And noise acts in the same way. "It drowns out the calls and signals that animals need to hear, that they rely on hearing," he added. "One group of scientists demonstrated exclusively by lashing speakers to one remote area of a national park and simply playing the sound of a road. And just the noise alone was enough to reduce the community of vocal birds by a third, and to reduce the body weight of those left behind because they spent a lot of time fearful, watching out for stuff, instead of doing things like foraging."

Yong emphasized that as humans, we have to remember that the wilderness is around us at all times; it's not just in our vacations to national parks or the beach — it's in our backyard, our commute home or on walks with us.

"If you feel like something isn't just part of your normal world, something that you only experience on a holiday, then you feel less impetus to care about it, to protect it," Yong said. "(The) wilderness is around us all the time. It exists in the sensory world of creatures that share our lives and might be in our backyards."

"I can tell you, I think the ability to extend the full force of my curiosity and my empathy into the creatures surrounding us is truly an incredible gift, and something that we should cherish and make use of," he concluded.

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