How to Smell like a Dog, with Ed Yong

Summary

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

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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.

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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]

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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]

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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.

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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]

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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]

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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 |

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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.

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

Transcript

[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. Doo, doo, doo.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Science chats with our favorite nerds.

[Ed Yong]

Yeah.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science versus. Today on the show, the amazing superpowers of anim. Some animals can see things that we can't see. They can hear things that we can't.

[Sam]

Hear, touch things that we will never feel.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

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 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.

[Sam]

The end of this chat.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

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.

[Ed Yong]

Hello.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

My interview with Ed Young is coming up just after the break.

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[Wendy Zuckerman]

Welcome back. Today on the show, the wonderful Ed Yong. Hi, Ed. Welcome to the show.

[Ed Yong]

Hello. Yeah, thanks for having me.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

In your book, you. 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.

[Ed Yong]

Yes.

[Sam]

So tell me more about that.

[Ed Yong]

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 favourite 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.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

It's such a lovely idea as we're walking around in the world to think.

[Sam]

About what else is there? What else could I be seeing or perceiving if I was a different animal?

[Ed Yong]

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 field 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. Electro fish can detect each other's signals. Seals can detect the tracks left behind by swimming fish. Sea turtles can detect the magnetic field of the earth itself.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

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 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 sense of smell?

[Ed Yong]

Yeah, it's actually all right. You know, I'm not going to tell you that our sense of smell is, as, you know, 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. Like, we have decent noses. We can smell a lot of different kinds of chemicals. We can some detect some of them at concentrations that rival championship sniffers like docs.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

And in your book, you did a fun experiment involving getting on all fours. Tell me about it.

[Ed Yong]

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 chocolates 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 in 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, but 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 our. 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.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Why doesn't that happen to dogs?

[Sam]

Why could dogs keep going?

[Ed Yong]

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.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

That.

[Ed Yong]

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 scented air into the part of the dog's head that is responsible for processing smell. That's not what happens in U.S. cool. The dog, it's just getting this constant conveyor belt of scented air going into its nose, whether it's on 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.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

And why do they love the smell of a human crutch?

[Sam]

What.

[Ed Yong]

I think so I think that is also related to how dogs interact with each other. Right. So what happens when two dogs meet? They sniff each other. 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 spewing molecules into the world around us all the time, whether we like it or not. And we do it especially, you know, from like, moist membranes more than other places. So, like our breath, our groins, armpits and these. And, you know, for us, as we've said, we don't go around sniffing each other in any of these areas. Dogs do, because to them, smell provides many clues about the other, the individual that they're meeting. Right. Smell provides clues about identity, but also about things like age, health, diet.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Now tell me about this remarkable chemical that gives us sea smell. Like the smell of the sea?

[Ed Yong]

Yeah. So this chemical is called dimethyl sulfide, or dms. It smells kind of seaweedy, a little oystery. It's the smell of the sea. 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 do not smell at all. It's a lie. Birds do smell. Many of them smell very, very well. And seabirds, like albatrosses are some of DMS is one of the things that they are paying attention to. So when there's a ton of krill 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.

[Sam]

It's so cool.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

It's like an oven with cookies baking.

[Ed Yong]

And you're like, yes, exactly like that. Exactly like that. And 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. What I love about this is that the ocean seems completely featureless to us. Right. The open ocean is just this flat landscape. It's two dimensional. It looks kind of boring. That is what it looks like to our eyes. But 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, um, belt. But not those of a bird, like an albatross.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

From smell to sight. 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.

[Sam]

Like if we could see the sort of beginnings of the human eye and then 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.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

They see the pyramids and they're like.

[Sam]

Aliens must have done it. And it's like, it's because you didn't see the crappier ones that they went, you know, before they perfected it.

[Ed Yong]

That's right. Like the beta test pyramid before we landed on this, like, deluxe model. Yeah. Right.

[Sam]

So when you look through the animal queendom, do you see, like, variations of what might become the human eye?

[Ed Yong]

Yeah, you absolutely do. And, you know, Darwin can. Darwin can relax. We have it sorted. So, yeah, there are actually animals with every possible degree of eye. The simplest eye really is just a single photoreceptor. So it's a single cell that is sensitive to light, that can con that where light. 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 from. When you have lots of those clustered together, then not only can you detect where light is coming from, but you now start. Have you start to have a very rudimentary image, like with. 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 that you can actually very easily see how an eye can build up over time from something that is really unlike an eye at all. That doesn't take a lot of generations to actually happen. And we have organisms that have every possible step along the way. And I think it also actually, animals 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. You know, an eagle has an incredible eye because an eagle is soaring at great heights and trying to detect rabbits at large distances. A starfish has a considerably worse eye because a starfish is not doing that. All a starfish needs to do is to find the shady shelter of a reef and, you know, scuttle into some crevice somewhere.

[Sam]

I don't want to fall into that trap of. To say that we are at the top of the. Some evolutionary pinnacle. It's all just a beautiful rainbow.

[Ed Yong]

Sure. Yeah.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

And then when we just to really land the point that, you know, humans are not at the pinnacle of the eye evolutionary story, when we think of color, humans can, you know, most humans can see the colors of the rainbow, but lots of animals can see in ultraviolet light. So beyond the purple or violet.

[Ed Yong]

Right.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Can you help us imagine the world of ultraviolet light? Whether it's what, how our world would.

[Sam]

Look different for birds and flowers?

[Ed Yong]

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 bullseyes 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 is color in and of itself. You can also blend ultraviolet with other colors. So most people have eyes with three kinds of colored 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 colours on it that to another bird than what you are currently seeing.

[Sam]

It's amazing. It's like, stop it.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

At that point, you're like, stop it.

[Ed Yong]

You know, I know, right? Like, enough, please.

[Sam]

Yeah. Did you have to wear that to the Met Gala? Like, did you, you know.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

So now let's look at sound and hearing. 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, also an entire animal rights movement.

[Sam]

Can you tell me about this?

[Ed Yong]

Yeah. So we're talking about whales and whales and we're talking about the really big whales, too. So things like blue whales, fin whales, the largest animals that exist and have ever existed. They communicate with each other with infrasound. So that's sound that's too low for the human ear to detect, and sounds that travels over very, very, very large distances in the ocean. A blue whale's call could conceivably traverse the entire span of, say, the Atlantic, which is crazy.

[Sam]

Crazy to think about.

[Ed Yong]

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 off the coast of the US when the Navy first picked up these kinds of sounds, they were, you know, they didn't know what to make of them. And eventually they tracked 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 US it seems like implausible. Right. Those messages would take maybe half an hour or so to move across that distance.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

But 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.

[Ed Yong]

Yeah. So his name is Daniel Kish. He is one of several human echolocators. So he is blind, and he has been blind since very close to his first birthday. And he navigates through the world with a cane, as many blind people do, but also by making these very loud clicks with his tongue. 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 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, a lawn, you know, whether there's a fire. He can tell a lawn.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

How would he just from. It sounds a little different.

[Ed Yong]

The texture of the grass is different from the. The texture of concrete or texture of pavement. He can tell, you know, when there's a tree, a branch blocking his path, you know, a fence. He can tell whether it's like chain link or slatted.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Were you walking with him and testing him?

[Sam]

Obviously.

[Ed Yong]

No, no, no. He didn't want to be 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. The word echolocation was actually defined in a paper that was about bats and humans, and everyone kind of forgot the human bits and the human bit. And 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 speed, up to a couple of hundred times a second. And they're listening for those echoes per bouncing off 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 into distance.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Amazing.

[Ed Yong]

Daniel is basically doing exactly the same thing. His clicks are not ultrasonic like those of a bat, 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.

[Sam]

How did it feel to be walking with him?

[Ed Yong]

So it felt amazing. It is very easy to watch Daniel and to think of this as some kind of superpower. But like every way of sensing the world, 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, most bats will really struggle to find it. So one of my favorite stories that Daniel told me is that he was once asked to try and tell 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.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Interesting.

[Ed Yong]

So they basically sound kind of the.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Same after the break. How an impeccable sense of touch can help turn a cockroach into a zombie.

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Welcome back.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

I'm here with Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Ed Young. 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 this. It's a gorgeous wasp.

[Ed Yong]

Oh, it's stunning.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Yeah, right? Inch long, metallic turquoise body.

[Sam]

It looks like it's wearing orange bike shorts kind of.

[Ed Yong]

Yes, yes, it does. Yeah. I mean, the green, the, the metallic green and orange combo is really working for us. I also want, I want that combo.

[Sam]

A combo I'm not sure I could get away with, but it's yes, no.

[Ed Yong]

Right.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

So tell us how she uses touch.

[Ed Yong]

The emerald cockroach wasp is a parasite that lays eggs inside the bodies of still living cockroaches. 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 brain. That changes its behavior. It makes it very docile. And, you know, we all know when 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.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

It really does. We actually have a Video and it.

[Sam]

Really does look like it's just walking this cockroach. It's a lot bigger than the wasp. Like a dog.

[Ed Yong]

It's crazy. It really does. Now where touch comes is how do you, how does the wasp know where to inject venom? Right. So it's got, it's, it's stung the cockroach. The tip of the sting is full of touch senses. So the sting not only is an egg laying tube and a drill, but it's also, and it's 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.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

So it'll go in, it sees the head goes vroom in through the carapace.

[Ed Yong]

That's right, yeah.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

But then it has to feel for the little brain. Right. Because it has to sting the brain.

[Ed Yong]

Yep, yep. You know, and, 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, they, the wasp is absolutely using its sense of touch to feel for the distinctive feel of a cockroach brain.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

And then 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.

[Sam]

They'Re not bothered by what's going on.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

What have you come to conclude here? Do you think that, that all animals in the queendom feel some semblance of pain?

[Ed Yong]

Yeah, I think it's a really, really tough question. Pain is unusual in that it's like the unwanted sense. Right. It's the thing that we definitely don't want to feel.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

It is helpful though because it does stop us from watching Star Revenge of the Sith a second time.

[Ed Yong]

That's right. That's more of a kind of emotional pain than the, than the more sensory pain that I am talking about. But sure, I agree. Now I'm thinking about that movie so real bad. I'm reliving the pain now. Why? Okay. Much of the discussion around animal pain has, has revolved around a very, very simple question, which is can this group of animals feel it? Yes or no? There have been, you know, there was a time when some people believed that no other animals besides humans could feel pain. And then that, that that ability was extended to things that are very similar to us, other mammals, birds, maybe. And then there were a lot of these edge group, edge cases. Right. So there's been for a long time this idea that fish don't pain. I think that that has been refuted by a number of very good studies showing that they very much do. But, but here's the thing. I think that there are probably many different kinds of ways of feeling and experiencing pain. So we might think, we might look to the cephalopods. So octopuses and squid, which are very distant from us, clearly very intelligent animals, do they have the ability to feel pain. So if you 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. The animal does react as if it's in pain is some of the indicators. But crucially, it doesn't seem to behave as if. It doesn't seem to act as if this arm 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. And it sort of makes sense in the, with the biology of a squid, right? Here is an animal that 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? 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 cut or broken. So, you know, 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. And I think the same is going to be true across the animal kingdom. So I said earlier that 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 needs, their ecology, their evolutionary history.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

So I guess we're in a time when some folks, particularly in the US Government, are questioning the value of scientific research, of many different branches of scientific research. And a lot of the research we've talked about today is driven by this wonderful curiosity of wanting to know our planet. And I know you mentioned at the beginning of your book, you're like, yeah.

[Sam]

There'S practical implications, but for the moment, I don't care. Let's just have fun in this space. I'm paraphrasing.

[Ed Yong]

No, I accept that. I'll sign off on that.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

But as you do mention, there have been practical implications of what probably started.

[Sam]

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.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

So I think my favorite example that.

[Sam]

You mentioned in the book is the oil company that started tracking leaks in.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Pipelines by adding ethyl mercaptan, which is a gas that smells, as you say, of farts and decay.

[Sam]

But turkey vultures would also be spotted around it.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

And so then you could say, oh, the turkey vultures are around. We know there's a leak there.

[Ed Yong]

I can give examples where learning about the senses of other animals has led to technological advances, has changed our understanding of our cells. So, you know, studying the sense of electric fish 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 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 think that making that specific case, that basic research into the lives of other creatures and what they're capable of, the idea that that will lead to economic or medical benefits, I don't think that's at all related to the 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, 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 it's also not true that if we just communicated the value of that research 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. 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. There's no amount of like 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?

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Yeah. You don't think bringing up examples like how military sonar has been honed by dolphin sonar?

[Ed Yong]

I really don't, I really, really don't. I don't think it's going to make a blind jotted difference.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

No.

[Ed Yong]

You know, I think that's, I think that's, I think that's playing the wrong game. I think that is misdiagnosing the threat and the solution.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

And while we are in the world of threats, it's not just tyrants. Throughout sort of these decades that scientists have been understanding animal senses, there are threats to those senses. We have light pollution, noise pollution and even smell pollution, which I learned from your book. That 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 that smell of the sea and allows albatrosses to find food?

[Ed Yong]

Yeah. So it turns out unfortunately, that plastics in the ocean are also a source of dms, inconveniently, which might be one reason why albatrosses often end up ingesting large chunks of the stuff. You know, many other sea animals are also drawn towards dms, like sea turtles. So this might be, you know, one reason why plastic pollution is so harmful to other animals. Aside from the fact that it's just everywhere.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Like reading that part of your book to find out that, oh my gosh, plastics are also emitting dms.

[Sam]

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 really screwed this up, you know.

[Ed Yong]

Yeah, this is one example about many. And you've touched on other senses too. You know, we, we are filling the darkness with light, we are filling the quiet with noise and all of these extra stimuli that we've added to the world, I, I don't think we naturally think of them as pollutants, but they are, 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 for us directly, one of the most insidious consequences of pollution is that it severs our relationship with the natural world. So light at night stops us from seeing the stars and the darkness. 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 and just more Distant from our everyday lives.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

So just to cap us off, then, 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.

[Ed Yong]

You know, I wrote large chunks of this book concurrently with reporting on the COVID 19 pandemic, and it really helped my mental health to be spending a lot of my time thinking about all of these wondrous things that other animals are doing and experiencing all around us. Thinking about the umwelt of another creature is a lot like going on and is a lot like an act of travel. You know, going to an alien world, traveling to a parallel dimension, or from the comfort of your own home. And it really has been that for me. I would almost call it escapism, but it's not. It's actually the opposite of that. It's an immersion in the true and full reality that we're always in and that we miss.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

All right, oddball questions. That's how we're gonna finish off this interview. A bunch of silly lightning round. Let's go.

[Sam]

Maybe there'll be a jingle by the.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Time this comes out.

[Sam]

We'd put it on here.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Ed, what's the most dangerous thing you've done for a book?

[Ed Yong]

I did get hit by a mantis shrimp, which has the most powerful punch in nature. This is a very, very small mantis shrimp, and it's still hurt.

[Sam]

Even a large mantis shrimp isn't a big animal.

[Ed Yong]

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's still hurt. You know, it didn't knot her, so there was that. I also got shocked by an electric catfish.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

What was the sound that came out of your mouth? Just to give us a sense of.

[Ed Yong]

The pain level, you know, I don't remember. I can't possibly recreate it for you, but, yeah, that was a literally shocking thing that I did for the book.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

What was your favorite title to a paper that you read while researching this book?

[Ed Yong]

I think Blue Tits are Ultraviolet Tits is a great. It's just, you know, very simple. At least they weren't researching great tits. That would have been exactly. That would have been too potent to resist.

[Sam]

Exactly.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Finish this sentence. Now that I know blank. I'll never look at my blank the same way again.

[Ed Yong]

Now that I know about how dogs smell the world. I'll never look at my dog in the same way again. And, you know, I wrote this book before I got my dog. His name is Typo. And it's completely. It completely changed the. It completely 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 I knew about how they smell the world.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

So now when you go on walks, you'll just let Typo smell whatever he wants to see.

[Ed Yong]

Yeah, we often take him on like, sniff walks where we let him dictate the pace, the route, the agenda, as it were.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Funnest object sitting in your house.

[Ed Yong]

Oh. A friend of mine sent me a stuffed cicada. Like a cicada plushie during the pandemic? No, no, not like a taxidermic cicada. No, like a cider cicada plushie. It sort of zips open like it's like a cicada nymph. Zips open and the adult cicada comes out. That's pretty cool.

[Sam]

Would that supposed to make you feel better during this time?

[Ed Yong]

I don't know. Maybe there's like, some symbolism of metamorphosis emerging from, like, many years underground into the light.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

Final question. Tell us about a time when you thought you were just talking about science, but somehow the dinner party was ruined.

[Ed Yong]

Okay, I have a very boring answer to this question, which is 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 kinds of dinner parties where I can talk about emerald cockroach wasps, and umwelt.

[Sam]

Ed Yong, thank you so much for your time. And thanks. Thanks for joining us on the show.

[Ed Yong]

Yeah, no worries. Thanks for having me.

[Wendy Zuckerman]

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. Sam.