Science Vs: "How to Smell Like a Dog" with Ed Yong

Release Date: September 25, 2025
Host: Wendy Zuckerman
Guest: Ed Yong, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and author of An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

Overview

In this thought-provoking and playful episode, Wendy Zuckerman welcomes acclaimed science journalist Ed Yong to explore the hidden world of animal senses, as revealed in his book An Immense World. Through vivid stories and cutting-edge science, they dive into how animals perceive their environments in ways that may seem unfathomable to humans. From an underestimated human sense of smell to the wild world of ultraviolet vision, echolocation, insect mind control, and the conservation threats that pollute animal perception—this conversation will completely change how listeners see (and smell, and hear) the non-human world.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Concept of "Umwelt": Every Animal’s Sensory Bubble

[04:14]

• Ed Yong introduces "umwelt":

  “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.” – Ed Yong [04:14]

• Umwelt is German for “environment,” but in biology, it denotes the unique slice of reality each species can access.

Animal Senses: Seeing, Smelling, Hearing the World Differently

The Human Sense of Smell—Better Than You Think

[06:42]

• Humans often claim to be “bad smellers,” but Ed Yong debunks this:

  “We have decent noses. We can smell a lot of different kinds of chemicals. We can detect some of them at concentrations that rival championship sniffers like dogs.” – Ed Yong [06:42]

• Yong recounts an experiment crawling on all fours—blindfolded, following a chocolate-scented string—mimicking a dog’s scent tracking, but much less efficiently [07:21].
• Why can’t humans keep up?

  “The way our noses work…every time you exhale, you lose that perception of whatever you’re smelling.” [07:21]

  • Dogs have a specialized stream of airflow solely for olfaction, allowing for non-stop scent processing [08:39].

Why Dogs Love Sniffing Crotches

[10:10]

• Ed explains it’s all chemical:

  “All animals to various degree, are just leaking sacks of chemicals. We’re spewing molecules into the world all the time… especially from moist membranes like groins and armpits.” – Ed Yong [10:10]

• For dogs, these areas reveal identity, age, health, and diet.

Birds' Surprising Sense of Smell & the Scent of the Sea

[11:32]

• Ed describes the chemical dimethyl sulfide (DMS) as giving the ocean its “sea smell,” which seabirds like albatrosses use to find food across featureless seas [12:20]:

  “To a bird with a right nose, like an albatross, the scent of DMS reveals the parts of the ocean that are richest in life and so richest in food.” [12:20]

The Evolution of Eyes and Seeing in Ultraviolet

[14:48]

• Darwin’s “absurd in the highest degree” skepticism that the human eye could evolve—Ed outlines the incremental, stepwise evolution from simple light sensitivity to complex eyes, all observable across the animal kingdom [14:48].
• Color vision beyond humans:

  “Birds have four [color receptors], 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.” – Ed Yong [17:39, 19:32]

Sound: Whale Songs & Human Echolocation

[20:46]

• Large whales communicate across oceans with infrasound—sound too low for humans to hear.

  “A blue whale’s call could conceivably traverse the entire span of, say, the Atlantic, which is crazy.” – Ed Yong [20:46]

• Ed discusses human echolocator Daniel Kish, who navigates the world by clicking his tongue:

  “He can tell when we’re walking past a house, a car, a lawn… a tree, a branch blocking his path… with his echolocation.” [22:49–24:09]

• On the similarity to bats, Ed notes:

  “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 often at incredible speed... and listening for those echoes.” [24:12]

  • Daniel’s “human” echolocation works similarly but with less detail.

Touch: The Wasp That Turns Cockroaches Into Zombies

[30:01]

• The emerald cockroach wasp uses touch to deliver venom into a cockroach’s brain, rendering it docile for its offspring to consume.

• “The tip of the sting is full of touch senses… The wasp can detect the texture, the shape maybe of a cockroach brain and uses that as a cue.” [31:13]

Pain Perception Across Species

[33:14]

• Not all animals experience pain alike; cephalopods (octopus vs. squid) demonstrate radically different pain behaviors.

  “Octopuses very much can feel pain. So here are two animals from the same broad group that have, I think, radically different experiences of pain.” – Ed Yong [35:50]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On perception and humility:

  “There’s so much wonder to be had everywhere… There’s all of this stuff, all these signals around us that we don’t perceive and that other animals do.” – Ed Yong [05:15]

• On color vision in birds:

  "Take the most colorful bird that you can imagine and now try and imagine that that bird has, you know, maybe 100 times more colours on it to another bird than what you are currently seeing." – Ed Yong [19:32]

• On why science is under attack:

  “Science is bad for tyrants and always has been. A populace that has a better understanding of the world around it is a populace that is much harder to rule by fear.” – Ed Yong [40:20]

Important Segments (Timestamps)

• [04:14] – Ed Yong introduces “umwelt”: the concept that all species live in separate sensory bubbles.
• [07:21] – Ed’s firsthand “dog-smelling” experiment.
• [08:39] – How dog noses anatomically outperform ours.
• [12:20] – How seabirds “see” with scent: the chemical DMS and what it reveals to albatrosses.
• [14:48] – Evolutionary steps of the eye across the animal kingdom and the non-hierarchical “rainbow” of visual ability.
• [17:39] – Ultraviolet color vision in birds and its implications for perceiving flowers, feathers.
• [20:46] – Whale infrasound communication over thousands of kilometers.
• [22:49] – Daniel Kish and human echolocation.
• [30:01] – The emerald cockroach wasp’s extraordinary tactile sense and its mind-control strategy.
• [33:14] – The complexity of animal pain perception.
• [40:20] – Ed on the real reason science is threatened by power.
• [42:05] – Pollution as a sensory disruptor: how plastics “smell” to seabirds and confuse them.
• [44:16] – Ed on writing as an escape and immersion into the umwelts of other species.

Conservation and Pollution: How Humans Change Animal Senses

• Noise, light, and chemical pollution (“smell pollution”) alter or degrade the signals animals evolved to use.
• Plastic debris emits DMS—tricking albatrosses and turtles into ingesting harmful waste [42:05].
• The severing of human connection to nature is an overlooked effect:

  “I think probably for us directly, one of the most insidious consequences of pollution is that it severs our relationship with the natural world.” – Ed Yong [43:37]

Ed Yong’s Personal Reflections

• Writing An Immense World was a “salve” during COVID reporting—“an immersion in the true and full reality that we’re always in and that we miss”. [44:16]
• On his dog Typo, post-book:

  “Now that I know about how dogs smell the world, I'll never look at my dog in the same way again.” [47:00]

• Ed’s favorite playful paper title: Blue Tits are Ultraviolet Tits [46:38]
• On science at dinner parties:

  “I throw the kinds of dinner parties where I can talk about emerald cockroach wasps and umwelt.” [48:54]

Summary Table: Key Animal Sensory Highlights

| Sense | Animal | Superpower/Notable Fact | |-------------|------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------| | Smell | Dogs | Dual airflow allows continuous scent detection | | Smell | Seabirds | Track food across oceans via DMS | | Sight | Birds | 4 cones; see 100x more colors incl. UV patterns | | Hearing | Whales | Infrasound travels entire oceans | | Hearing | Humans (echolocators)| Can navigate using reflect sound, like bats (with limitations) | | Touch | Emerald wasp | Uses touch to find and inject venom into cockroach’s brain | | Pain | Octopus | Experience is highly localized, cradle injuries | | Pain | Squid | Experience is diffuse, hypersensitized body-wide |

Final Thoughts

How to Smell Like a Dog is a mind-bending tour through the hidden worlds of animal perception. With infectious enthusiasm, Ed Yong and Wendy Zuckerman urge listeners to look at animals—and, indeed, life itself—with new humility and awe. Science reveals not only what we cannot see, but also how our actions are blinding, deafening, or confusing our fellow creatures. The episode ends on a note of curiosity and hope: the more we learn about other umwelts, the richer our own experience of the world becomes.

For full show notes and the book, see Ed Yong’s An Immense World and visit Science Vs on Spotify.