Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses in Science and Inquiry

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Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses

Jackie Higgins

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Jan 15, 2022 Petra lives on a little Caribbean island rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2022-reviews, 2022-read, medicine-science, animals-ethology, reviewed

4.75 stars rounded up. It got a bit tedious about spiders. No matter what spiders do or feel or how that relates to people, I have a hard time in getting any interest up in them. Actually if they are bigger than a dime I am mostly disgusted by them. Now octopuses whose arms can act independently but only when the octopus can see them, that was interesting. Imagine only being able to control your limbs if you could see them. Going for a pee in the night would be a nightmare as it was for a man wh 4.75 stars rounded up. It got a bit tedious about spiders. No matter what spiders do or feel or how that relates to people, I have a hard time in getting any interest up in them. Actually if they are bigger than a dime I am mostly disgusted by them. Now octopuses whose arms can act independently but only when the octopus can see them, that was interesting. Imagine only being able to control your limbs if you could see them. Going for a pee in the night would be a nightmare as it was for a man who lost the ability to use his limbs without thinking and had to see them and direct them in order to do so. Turning off the light at night would mean he fell. The book didn't explain what the octopus did at night if something happened that it would need to move.

One thing that really made me think was the harlequin shrimp. It is perhaps the strongest creature on earth - its punch can shatter aquarium walls. In other book I read that the same shrimp has 12 photoreceptors as opposed to our three, so could it see a vast range of colours we cannot even imagine? We'll probably never know.

This same shrimp appears to be sentient too. A scientist and author (I forget which book) wrote that he tried the mirror test on his favourite shrimp he used to visit under the sea. He put a blob on the little creature's 'forehead' and then placed a mirror in front of them. The shrimp touched its forehead... it had recognised itself in the mirror. Children don't do that until they are about 2, elephants, dolphins, magpies, rays, great apes, even strangely, cleaner wrasses pass it. Dogs don't, it's impossible to know if cats do but don't feel like doing anything about it, parrots don't, most creatures don't. But a shrimp...

I think the study of animal sentience is not very far advanced but this book goes some way to showing non-scientists the senses that animals have that we don't and don't necessarily understand - migration is the big one. There isn't one way to do vast migrations - it might be through magnetism, through a kind of GPS oriented on the sun, through learning a path with landmarks or most mysteriously, monarch butterflies, all of whom are of a new generation so it is not known how they do it.

A good book with a lot to think about and very engagingly written. ...more

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