Starting your title with a why/what/who/where/how modifier should be unnecessary.

Titles must be able to stand on their own without requiring readers to click on a link.

not 'TIL something interesting about bacon').

Make them descriptive, concise and specific (e.g.

Rephrase your post title if the following are not met:

Posts that omit essential information, or present unrelated facts in a way that suggest a connection will be removed. Social and economic issues (including race/religion/gender).Recent political issues and politicians.This includes (but is not limited to) submissions related to: No politics, soapboxing, or agenda based submissions. Any sources (blog, article, press release, video, etc.) with a publication date more recent than two months are not allowed. No personal opinions, anecdotes or subjective statements (e.g 'TIL xyz is a great movie'). Videos are fine so long as they come from reputable sources (e.g. Images alone do not count as valid references. Please link directly to a reliable source that supports every claim in your post title. Submit interesting and specific facts that you just found out (not broad information you looked up, TodayILearned is not /r/wikipedia). Male mice make a pheromone called darcin, after Pride and Prejudice's male hero.You learn something new every day what did you learn today? The ocean has a secret topography of scents.Ī snake's tongue motion creates two donut-shaped rings of air, sucking in odors from either side. Make of them what you will, then read An Immense World. I can't do it justice, so I'm going to wrap up by sharing a few things I gleaned. And they definitely have appendages and receptors we don't. They are unspeakably exotic and rather commonplace. Keep in mind that the critters discussed live not only on the planet's surface amongst us puny humans, but also underground, underwater, and in the air. While they are all mind-blowing, I feel (heh) the four 'touch' chapters, which include pain, heat, contact and flow, and surface vibrations, are the most intriguing. Besides, sight is really complicated, in more ways than you know, so it gets a couple chapters to itself. If you were to write such a book, which of the senses would you lead off with? (n.b.: there are way more than five.) Despite our strong visual bias, and because we are but 'leaking sacks of chemicals' and he is mostly discussing animals, Yong starts with smell and taste. 'To get an idea of the shape of, imagine placing a miniature trampoline on the bottom of a goldfish bowl and turning the whole thing on its side.' Pretty clear, right? (Now imagine a couple of those just behind your nostrils.) He then tells us how the arrangement works. Yong excels in placing things in contexts that readers can appreciate, and despite the challenges of describing all sorts of animal activities and anatomical parts that are beyond our ken, he's great at elucidating the unfamiliar.

Unlike a few other sciencey titles I've browsed, this is no mere compendium of lists. His subtitle, 'How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us,' only hints at the scope of the book. You've no doubt seen articles on how the noises of city life are making birds sing louder, or how artificial lighting adversely affects their migration. If you've read A Kansas Bestiary, you know that boreal chorus frogs hear through their front legs and regal fritillary butterflies smell with their feet. If you've read James Nestor's book Deep, you know about the sperm whale clicks that travel thousands of miles. If you're a birder, you may have heard that kestrels can see the urine trails of the voles they prey on using ultraviolet-light vision. There's lots of this sort of quirky information out there. (I can't believe he missed it, but Wikipedia tells me that some treehoppers, bugs that look like thorns, even communicate with geckos this way.) Lucky for us, there are smart voices to direct our attention and help translate.Įd Yong, more writer than biologist, hooked me when he described in the introduction to An Immense World how treehopper vibrations sound like cows mooing. We might even care a bit more about little things like biodiversity and extinction. There's so much fascinating activity going on around us, we'd all walk around slack-jawed if we could witness it. The 'immense world' concept is something I was aiming for when drafting the abandoned plants-and-fungi post.

Death spiral ants