Dear Friend,

As we near the end of October and the conclusion of Ed Yong’s wonderful exploration, An Immense World, here’s a reminder that our “recommend a book” form is live and ready for your input! If you want to suggest a group read for this project, please fill out this form.

In the coming week, we’ll be finishing An Immense World. At about 15-pages per day, we should be able to conclude in time for our final post on October 29th, which leaves a couple of days to prepare for the November contemplative reading selection: Long Life by Mary Oliver, which we will begin on November 1st. I hope you will join us.

This past week, we read pages 180-270, covering the latter part of chapter six into chapter nine. The topics included touch, vibration, sound, and echoes. Once again, there was a lot of information, most of it new to me. Some of the really exciting questions had to do with what type of sense are things like vibration and echolocation most similar to? Are they touch? Sound? Sight?

In chapter seven, “surface vibrations,” Yong writes that vibrations for insects are akin to sound, not touch. It might seem like insects would send vibrations out through plant parts, stems and leaves, in order to feel their way across the plant or to send signals to other insects, but in fact, when the plant sounds are amplified, we can hear all sorts of different sounds, songs, yells, laughs, and etc. that are being created by insect vibrations. They’re communicating with themselves and with one another through sound, the way humans and other animals might! But that’s not the end of the story for interesting near-sense communications.

In chapter nine, Yong moves from surface vibrations to echolocation, which might be thought of as vibrations through air or water. He spends a great deal of time on bats, of course, but we learn that bats are not the only or even necessarily the best at echolocation. Whales and dolphins do this, too! Most interestingly, some moths have evolved numerous ways to baffle bat echolocation through misdirection. Some bats, meanwhile, have further evolved to compensate for those tricksters. Nature is a marvel, and adaptation is the rule, not the exception.

Perhaps the most interesting section to me comes late in chapter nine, though, when Yong is discussing larger animals, like elephants, whales and dolphins, and the extent of their communication through vibrations or echolocation. Elephants, it seems, can communicate over vast distances through both surface vibrations (stomping on the ground) but also through very low rumbles, which go unheard by human observers. Two elephants could be having an entire conversation about their human friend standing nearby, without that friend even knowing it!

Similarly, whales and dolphins have calls that are inordinately powerful. A sperm whale’s call, for example, is ridiculously loud, whereas a dolphin’s sonar is ridiculously strong at sensing across distances and even within containers. A dolphin can identify the type of object inside a canister, under water and at an extreme distance, just by using its sonar. Their sonar helps them see a clear image of something even if it is unseeable. As Yong puts it, echolocation, then, is both seeing with sound but also touching with sound. It just depends on what the animal can and does use it for.

Most shocking of all? Even humans can do it! Yong describes a man, blinded as a boy, who started clicking at a very young age and by doing so taught him to see without seeing. It’s not just an immense world, it’s a remarkable one!

I wonder, what’s a skill you think belongs only to a certain animal or insect? How might a human learn to do it? What necessity might require this adaptation?

Meditation: May you feel safe. May you feel strong. May you be content. May you live free from suffering.” –Adapted from a lovingkindness meditation by Sylvia Boorstein.

With love and wishes for wonderous reading,

~Adam

Twitter (X); Threads; Instagram; Facebook; Donate.