Secret Worlds: The extraordinary senses of animals

How do animals experience the world? Many animals experience a world far richer than ours, in sight, sound, and smell, and interact with each other in ways humans simply do not pick up, and which continue to surprise researchers. This book explores not only the wonder of animal senses, but how they work and how scientists go about investigating them. And, throughout, it considers how these senses came to be: the book explains that evolution is at the root of it all. Senses arose to enable animals to catch prey, to hide, and to mate more effectively, usually honed through fierce competition and arms races with predators. The result, over millions of years, is a wondrous panoply of ways of experiencing the world, against which our own senses often pale into insignificance.