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Academic & Professional Books  Organismal to Molecular Biology  Ethology

Secret Worlds The Extraordinary Senses of Animals

Popular Science
By: Martin Stevens(Author)
262 pages, 8 plates with 11 colour photos; 46 b/w photos and b/w illustrations
NHBS
How does a bat – or an owl, a bee, or a platypus – experience the world? Secret Worlds is an enthralling book on how animal senses work and scientists investigate them.
Secret Worlds
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  • Secret Worlds ISBN: 9780198813682 Paperback Jun 2023 In stock
    £9.99
    #259046
  • Secret Worlds ISBN: 9780198813675 Hardback Jun 2021 Not in stock: Usually dispatched within 6 days
    £21.49
    #251394
Selected version: £21.49
About this book Contents Customer reviews Biography Related titles

About this book

Martin Stevens explores the extraordinary variety of senses in the animal kingdom, and discusses the cutting-edge science that is shedding light on these secret worlds.

Our senses of vision, smell, taste, hearing, and touch are essential for us to respond to threats, communicate and interact with the world around us. This is true for all animals – their sensory systems are key to survival, and without them animals would be completely helpless. However, the sensory systems of other animals work very differently from ours. For example, many animals from spiders to birds can detect and respond to ultraviolet light, to which we are blind. Other animals, including many insects, rodents, and bats can hear high-frequency ultrasonic sounds well beyond our own hearing range. Many other species have sensory systems that we lack completely, such as the magnetic sense of birds, turtles, and other animals, or the electric sense of many fish. These differences in sensory ability have a major bearing on the ways that animals behave and live in different environments, and also affect their evolution and ecology.

In Secret Worlds, Martin Stevens explores the remarkable sensory systems that exist in nature, and what they are used for. Discussing how different animal senses work, he also considers how they evolve, how they are shaped by the environment in which an animal lives, and the pioneering science that has uncovered how animals use their senses. Throughout, he celebrates the remarkable diversity of life, and shows how the study of sensory systems has shed light on some of the most important issues in animal behaviour, physiology, and evolution.

Contents

Preface

1. A Plethora of Senses
2. Singing Mice and Painting Pictures with Sound
3. For My Eyes Only
4. Electric Attraction
5. Stars of the Tactile World
6. Smelling in Stereo
7. Homing Turtles and Animal Magnetism
8. A Changing World

Customer Reviews

Biography

Martin Stevens is Professor of Sensory and Evolutionary Ecology at the University of Exeter. His research has covered a wide range of areas, but much of his current work explores how animals change colour for camouflage, and how human impacts on the environment are affecting animal colouration and vision. He has authored over 120 scientific papers, two textbooks, and a popular science book on deception in nature Cheats and Deceits, (Oxford University Press, 2016). Stevens' work is frequently covered in the popular media, including by the New Scientist and the New York Times. He has appeared several times on radio and TV, such as on the BBC and on National Geographic, and has given a range of public lectures around the world.

Popular Science
By: Martin Stevens(Author)
262 pages, 8 plates with 11 colour photos; 46 b/w photos and b/w illustrations
NHBS
How does a bat – or an owl, a bee, or a platypus – experience the world? Secret Worlds is an enthralling book on how animal senses work and scientists investigate them.
Media reviews

"a riveting new volume that explores the extraordinary senses of animals [...] This volume brings the wonders of these sensory worlds to a more general audience."
– Michael J. Ryan, Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol.97, no.1

"While paying its dues to those amazing abilities of animals, Secret Worlds has some very intriguing things to say about the evolution and plasticity of the sense – and above all, the cost of acquiring them. [...] One can only hope that Stevens will return with fresh insights in a few years."
– Simon Ings, New Scientist

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