Science Friday - Roe V. Wade Overturned, Animals’ Amazing Sensory Abilities. June 24, 2022, Part 1

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

U.S. Supreme Court Overturns Roe V. Wade The U.S. Supreme Court decided Friday to overturn Roe v Wade. While there have been rumblings that this decision was going to happen, it’s still a shock to many people in the U.S. In early May, a draft opinion was leaked that had circulated among the court justices, showing a majority of them were in support of the overturn. This will have huge ripple effects throughout the U.S. when it comes to reproductive healthcare. A study from the University of California predicts a quarter of abortion clinics in the U.S. are likely to shut down under this rule, with the biggest impact in the South and Midwest. Guest host Maddie Sofia talks with SciFri radio producer Kathleen Davis about what’s next for abortion rights in America and other science news of the week, including evidence of community transmission of polio in London and Canada’s single-use plastic ban.   The Millions Of Ways Animals Sense The World A shark tracks its victims by smell, but uses the unmissable signal of a fish’s electrical field to make its final strike. Fire-chaser beetles can detect the heat of distant forest fires with specialized cells in their heads. Baby tree frogs can detect the seismic signals of a striking snake from within the egg—and seem to hatch earlier in defense. And the prey-hunting visual system of one unassuming-looking Mediterranean fly, known as the killer fly, works faster than any other species we’ve observed. All of these are examples of an animal’s umwelt, their specialized sensory bubble or window onto the world, as described by German biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll over one hundred years ago. As science writer Ed Yong writes in his newest book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal The Hidden Realms Around Us, our history of studying animals’ umwelten has been fraught with hubris, misunderstandings, and mistakes. But bit by bit, we’re learning to appreciate the truly spectacular perceptive abilities of the owl, the elephantfish, and the humble jumping spider. Yong joins guest host Maddie Sofia to share stories of amazing animal sensory abilities and the challenges of both imagining and describing these other realms using human-centric language. Plus, the uniquely human capacity to imagine other animals’ umwelten, and how we can use it to make the world better for them.   Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Maddie Safaya sitting in for Ira Flato. You may know me as the former co-host of the show Shortwave, NPR's Daily Science Podcast. I am so, so glad to be back on your radios once again. Later in the hour, science writer Ed Yong takes us inside the amazing sensory worlds of other animals. But first, this morning, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, the ruling that guaranteed abortion rights for nearly 50 years. years. The decision was expected, given that the draft opinion was leaked in May, but it is still devastating to many people in the United States. So what will the impact of this decision be? Joining me now to break down this and other short stories of the week is my guest Kathleen Davis, producer for Science Friday, joining me from Brooklyn, New York. Hey, Kathleen. Hey, Maddie. So many of us have been waiting with bated breath for this legal decision. Now that it's out, What does this mean? Yeah, I mean, it's important to note that this isn't really a surprise.

We've known that a decision has been pending in the Supreme Court for about a month now. And to give our listeners a little bit of a refresher, a draft opinion was leaked in early May that had circulated among the Supreme Court justices. And it showed that a majority of them were in support of overturning Roe v. Wade. We now know that the outcome of that draft was indeed the court's final decision. The actual case the court looked at was called Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. So that Jackson Mississippi Clinic is the only abortion provider in the state. It sued Mississippi over a 15-week abortion ban that has no exceptions for pregnancies by rape or incest. The Supreme Court going in favor of this Mississippi law effectively overturns Roe v. Wade's precedent,

which is going to have huge ripple effects throughout the U.S. Right. I mean, what could this mean for the country? Yeah, so a study from the University of California says that more than 25% of abortion clinics in the U.S. are likely to shut down under this overturn. And this will probably have the biggest impact in the South and the Midwest. Science Friday has been reporting a lot over the last few weeks on repercussions that this overturn could have. We've already seen that a six-week abortion ban in Texas has limited access to. care for things like miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. Ectopic pregnancies are a rare but potentially fatal medical condition where the fetus actually grows outside of the uterus. And those repercussions will come from the fact that medication that's used for abortions are also approved treatments for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies.

And we've reported on the fact that in vitro fertilization treatment could also be wrapped up in some tricky legal territory. Yeah. And Kathleen, I feel like we'd be remissed not to say that abortions have happened forever and will continue to happen under this new ruling. Right. A lot of reproductive rights advocates say that people are still going to seek abortions. And without legal options, there are some people who may have to turn to more dangerous methods. But I think it's really important to keep in mind that over half of abortions in the United States are done using medication. And although many,

Many states will make accessing these prescriptions illegal. There are online suppliers from abroad that will ship the same FDA-approved medications to U.S. patients, even though it is technically illegal to order prescription medication from overseas. And, you know, just as in the past, access to abortion is going to depend on how much money and resources people have. So people with money and time to travel across state lines to get an abortion will still be able to do that. but people who don't have those same resources won't be able to. And this is actually addressed in the dissent by justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer, in the opinion. So they say that today's decision, the majority says, permits each state to address abortion as it pleases.

But they say this is cold comfort for the poor woman who cannot get the money to fly to a distant state for a procedure. Right. Okay. Let's switch gears in head over to London. for our next story. There's been evidence of the polio virus being found in wastewater. Tell me about that. Yeah. So in North and East London, evidence has been discovered of community transmission of polio virus. The way that people found this out was through sewage, which might sound kind of weird, but the U.S. tests wastewater for viruses as well. It's how a lot of places are keeping track of COVID transmission rates. In terms of polio, sewage tests in the UK. pick up a handful of unrelated polio virus findings every year. That's not super unusual. And this is

largely due to virus shedding that happens after people get immunized. But this is the first time in a while that there has been a cluster found. Experts say that risk to the general public is low at this time. And it's important to note that no cases of the actual polio disease have been reported, nor have there been any cases of paralysis, which is associated with polio cases. Also, paralysis is pretty rare when it comes to polio. Right. And to be clear, polio was eradicated in most parts of the world because of vaccines, right? Right. The last case was found in the 80s in the UK. And in Britain, the vast majority of people are vaccinated against polio when they're kids.

So the genetic sequences of the virus that were found in the sewage suggests that these individuals may be related. So the government is urging people to make sure that they're fully vaccinated against polio. And if they're not to make sure that they make that a priority. In the UK, kids are vaccinated when they're 8, 12, and 16 weeks old. And then boosters are available when the kids are a little bit older. In the U.S., there has been no polio that has actually originated. in the country since 1973. Kids here get vaccinated with an inactivated virus when they're two and four months old, and then they get two more doses when they're a little older. Got it. Okay,

let's move on to a story about an invasive species in Florida, a big invasive species, we should say, a Burmese python. Tell us all about that. Yeah, so this story comes to us from reporter Rebecca Johnback at National Geographic. So earlier this month, researchers, in Naples, Florida, found and killed the largest Burmese python that was ever recorded in the state. It weighed 215 pounds and it was almost 18 feet long. That is massive. I don't think I need to tell you that. The thing is, Burmese pythons are not native to Florida.

They're an invasive species that were introduced to the state in the 70s. It's likely that these came from the exotic pet trade. since the 70s, their populations have exploded in the wild. And it's really not hard to understand why, because this python that was recently found was pregnant. I don't want to ask, but I want to ask, Kathleen, how many babies are we talking about? So this python, get ready, had 122 proto eggs that were just dating. So potentially 122 baby pythons could have been born from this one mama python. The researchers who studied the snake say this is a record number of eggs.

It was also way bigger than normal. So most Burmese pythons found in Florida are between 6 and 10 feet long. This one, again, was 18 feet. So record size, record eggs. And I do know that these pythons have already been doing damage to Florida's ecosystem, right? Tell me a little bit about that. Yeah. So if you've ever been to Florida, you know that there is a lot of wildlife

there. For a python, the ecosystem is kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet. So 73 different kinds of animal species have been found in python guts in Florida. They eat native birds, mammals, sometimes alligators. This one that was recently found had a deer in its stomach. Researchers call Burmese pythons an invasive apex predator, which is a pretty catchy name, frankly. It's a title for sure. Some researchers are specifically concerned about how Burmese pythons interact with Florida Panthers. So we've talked a little bit about Panthers on this show. They're an endangered species, and it's estimated that there's only about 200 of them left. And Florida Panthers and Burmese pythons have one big thing in common.

They love to eat deer. So if these pythons continue to reproduce at the scale that they have, we could see a lot of changes to the native panther population, if those deer keep getting eaten. Right. Okay, so is there any sort of like plan for keeping track of these pythons? Yeah, there's a really interesting plan that has talked about in this story. So there are research teams that are out there that are dedicated to catching these invasive pythons.

And a strategy that they're using now is to use male pythons as quote unquote, scouts to find female pythons during the breeding season. These males are GPS tracked. So in theory, the researchers can find where they're going to breed and then kill them before they have more babies. Let's end this with a story about Canada's plastic ban. What plastics are included here, Kathleen? Yeah, so Canada's government made an announcement earlier this week that they are going to ban some plastics starting this December. So this plastic ban is on the manufacture and importation of what the country deems as,

quote unquote harmful single-use plastics. That means things like grocery bags, cutlery, and straws. It's important to note, though, that there are some medical exemptions for single-use straws, which are important for some people who have certain medical conditions where, say, they don't have a lot of motor control of their jaws. But this manufacturing ban on Canada goes on things like checkout bags, cutlery, ring carriers. That ban is going to go into effect starting in December. And if that sounds like it's really soon, it's because it is to let businesses who sell these items transition at a more manageable pace.

The sale ban will completely go into effect in December of 2023. And then there are other items that will have until 2024 to fully phase out. Kathleen, can you give me some context here? What are the stats on how much single-use plastic Canada goes through? Yeah. So according to the Canadian government, up to 15 billion plastic shopping bags are used every year. That is billion with a bee.

And about 16 million plastic straws are used daily. That's a lot. The Canadian government says that this ban, when it's all said and done, could reduce carbon emissions by 1.8 megatons. That's a lot of tons. So how likely is it that the U.S. could do something like this? Well, as we all know very well,

it's hard to get things done here in the U.S. Right. So on a federal level, it's unlikely that we would see something like this anytime soon. But there are some cities that have, you know, some kind of plastic ban in effect. So New York City, for example, where I am, it bans plastic shopping bags and a lot of businesses. So, you know, maybe someday we'll have more widespread rules on single-use plastics, but probably not that soon. That's all the time we have for now. I'd like to thank my guest, Kathleen Davis, producer for Science Friday, joining me from Brooklyn, New York.

Kathleen, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Maddie. We have to take a break, and when we come back, a look into the world that animals can see, but humans can only imagine. This is Science Friday. I'm Maddie Safaya. Pop culture often imagines humans seamlessly entering the worlds of other animals. I mean, the Animorphs books were big in my house. Or what about this classic?

Spidey sense. My spider sense is tingling. I'm being watched. My spider sense tells me, oh, oh. But the world's animals' experience are vastly different from ours. We've never experienced the world through magnetic fields, flowing ocean currents, or high-pitched vibrations. How do you understand a fish that learns by sensing electric fields? Beatles that know no language except the heat of a distant forest fire,

mole rats that make their way around using touch-sensitive teeth. Science writer Ed Yong tries to translate for us. He's interviewed manatees, tree hoppers, and a hundred different scientists to write his latest book, An Immense World, How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. He's here today to talk about what he's learned about the world's animals perceive. that we can only try to imagine. Welcome back to Science Friday, Ed. Hi, thanks for having me.

Absolutely. Okay, so like I mentioned, there are 100 plus different animals mentioned in this book. I saw you got punched by a mantis shrimp, shocked by an electric eel, spent time in deep freeze with hibernating ground squirrels. Tell me what your favorite animal interaction you had was during your research. Oh, so I, I,

I went to this lab in Missouri to meet a guy called Rex Cokroft who studies leafhoppers. And these are small insects that live on plants that I think most people have never heard of. But I guarantee you that if you've been to any park or green space, you will have been next to a leaf hopper at some point. They send vibrational messages through plants. They vibrate their abdomens and send them. these seismic signals through the stems and leaves of the plants in which they stand, that other leaf hoppers can then pick up. These vibrations are inaudible to us, but if you clip a little microphone onto the plant,

you can translate to them into sound. And, you know, I went to this lab to listen to these vibrational calls myself. And they are astonishing. You know, I saw this, like, tiny little insect sitting on a leaf producing a sound. producing a sound that sounded like an almost like a lion's roar, you know, a very deep purring noise that you would never have thought would come from an insect. And then we went on this prospecting expedition, like going to a local park and clipping microphones onto like little bits of plants, like little grass stuff and so on,

trying to find one of these things in the wild. And we eventually found, you heard to this noise, it sounded, like, I don't know. It sounded like a fairy hyena laughing. Do you feel comfortable giving me a tree hopper impression right now? I do, right, because the tree hop is not going to be listening to this. I'm not going to get like canceled for doing a bad tree hopper impression. It sounded like it sounded like a weird sniggering noise. And once I convinced myself that it wasn't in fact the scientist just like, you know, standing behind me and it just felt magical. Like most of these, these insects are very rarely studied. You have very few people go around clipping microphones

onto like bits of glass. But when you, so it means that when you do, you stand a reasonable chance of hearing something that no one has ever heard before. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I love that. Okay. I'm also, you know, I'm just thinking about all these different sensory systems in your book of all of these animals, manatees, jumping spiders, your corgi typo. Was there a sensory system or like a perspective that you were like, oh, I want that. That would be incredible. Yes. I think there are quite a few, and they're all my babies, so it's a little hard to pick between them. I think that in terms of like the more exotic senses that we really don't have access to, like dolphin sonar would be truly incredible. And so dolphins have the ability to echolocate.

So they reach high-pitch calls and they sense the world by passing the rebounding echoes. But because of the way sound moves through water, dolphin sonar also penetrates through flesh. A dolphin echolocating on you can probably perceive your skeleton, your lung. I don't know how I feel about that. I know, right? Suddenly, I don't know, have you ever swam with a dolphin? Yes, I have.

It probably knows stuff about you that even your close friends don't know about it. Right, right. So, yeah, I think that experience of, you know, essentially being a swimming, living, living medical scanner would be absolutely incredible. I love that. And then there are also, you know, even for more familiar. familiar senses, birds have access to this entire dimension of colors that we can't see. And if we could, flowers, the feathers of other birds, much of the world would look very, very different. And I think just being able to like briefly get that sense of like a more kaleidoscopic reality would be incredible. Absolutely. Okay. So one of the things that you emphasize is the importance of studying animals in their own right, right? Not just how we can use them or mimic them. Why is that so important, Ed? I think for a few reasons. You know, I think sometimes our relationships with animals do become a little bit transactional. You know, they, scientists study them as model organisms, as ways, as wind.

into our biology, or they might study them as sources of bio-inspiration, things that could point us to words better technology. But, you know, I don't really care about any of that. An immense world is about trying to understand animals for their own sake. And I think that's important just because they are kind of miraculous and because their ways of sensing the world are so different. from ours. Our senses give us a perception of the world that feels complete. And that sense of completion is an illusion. We actually are only perceiving a very thin sliver of all there is to perceive. You know, our world is just a small fraction of the immense world that surrounds us. And we can't access that unless we really think about what other animals are doing.

So if we ignore them or if we allow them to go extinct, we lose a way of understanding the world around us. And I think our reality becomes a little bit narrower and a little bit more constrained as a result. So it's really a sort of philosophical argument. You know, I think that if we really want to know what is happening around us, we have no choice but try and consider the perspectives of other creatures. All right, Ed. So let's try to consider some of those perspectives of other creatures. And I want to start by talking about that sensory bubble that you alluded to that all animals live in. The parts of the world that an animal can actually sense.

It's called the umwelt. Where did this word come from? So it was popularized by a German biologist named Yakut van Uxkel. And I'm very sorry to all German speakers were absolutely. that it's hard, all right. And so he used, so the word umwelt comes from the German for environment. But Vonutskir wasn't using it to talk about the physical environment, you know, not like the plants or the mountains or what have you.

He meant the sensory environment. The part of that world that the animal can perceive through its own unique set of eyes is, you know, noses or whatever, or other sense organs. The umwelt is the slice of reality that each creature has access to, and it differs radically from one species to another. How would you describe like the umwelt of your smell-focused pet dog typo, for example? Take us into typo's brain. So typo can see further to the same.

sides than I can, as a simple example. His color vision is more limited than mine. So while my visual spectrum runs from red to violet, his goes from yellow to blue. But through his nose, the world is far richer than I could possibly imagine. And that's evident whenever we go for a walk, he sniffs furiously as we trund along the same streets that I walk along day in and day out. And every time we do that, it's a new adventure to him. He sniffs the plants that he encounters. He sniffs patches of dried pee from dogs that have walked through those streets before. And when he does that, he gets biographical information about those dogs.

He knows who's been there. He knows what they've been up to. You know, maybe he has an idea about their health or what they've recently been eating. To me, typo sniffing like dog pee on our walk is a little bit like me checking my social media feed. It's not just, it's a way for him to connect socially with the other dogs in his world, even when they're not immediately next to him. And the parallels between that and me like scrolling through Instagram, and seeing what my far-off friends are doing are actually pretty exact. I think that those two things are incredibly compatible.

I want to talk about actually studying this stuff because I can imagine it's really challenging to study these sensory systems so different from ours, especially when even our terminology like ultrasonic is defined by human sensory ranges and limitations. So talk to me a little bit about that. Yeah, it's really hard to escape our own biases. And you touched a great example. Ultrasonic is almost like anthropomorphic by definition. That just refers to frequencies over 20,000 hertz, which is the top of the human hearing range. Actually, you know, most animals, most other mammals certainly can hear just fine into that range. For them, it's not ultrasound. and it's just sound. Yeah, right. And similarly, you know, ultraviolet, a color that we can't see,

but it exists just beyond the violet end of the rainbow, you know, it's not really ultra to most of the sighted animal kingdom, which actually can see ultraviolet. The limitations of our senses then create limitations in our science. So for a long time, scientists kept, thinking that seeing ultraviolet was special, that it was the province of just a very narrow range of the animal kingdom, and that it might be used for sending secret messages that most other creatures could not see. So you might have ultraviolet markings on your face that were

only perceptible to your species. But it turns out that if most other animals actually can see ultraviolet, it's not very secret at all. Absolutely. It just happens to be. another color. Quick reminder that I'm Maddie Safaya and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to science writer Ed Yong, who has a new book about the amazing sensory worlds of animals. So how do we actually, you know, study this stuff? Like give me an example of studying a sense that we don't remotely have,

like how we've managed to try. So echolocation is actually a great example of this. and it turns out to be a sense that despite being, you know, feeling exotic to most people, is one that is remarkably easy to study because to echolocate, a bat, for example, must produce sound. So it's listening for the echoes of its own calls, and without the call, there is no echo. So the bat to sense the world around it needs to be making noise. And by changing the nature of those calls, their frequency, their duration, the bat can rest different information from the world around it. So a scientist can look at where the bat is aiming at sonar pulses.

They can look at the frequency of those pulses and they can get a sense of what the bat is trying to detect, whether it's like trying to search for an insect in open air, whether it's trying to navigate around obstacle, whether it's homing in for the kill. Yeah. And that's sort of incredible, right? It means that by recording a bat's calls, you can almost get at the bat's intent. And that makes things like echolocation,

you know, reasonably easy to study. But it also, there's always going to be a gap. You're never going to fully appreciate what exactly is going on in the bat's head, even though its calls give you a sense of what the bat is trying to do with its echolocation. Right. You know, can I ask you, in a similar vein, as how it was difficult, you know, how it's kind of difficult to study these sensory systems, was it difficult to write about this research? Would you, like, write a sentence and be like, ugh, what a human way to write that sentence? You know what I mean?

Right. Yes, very much so. It certainly, you know, in that way, like, it's quite hard to, um, uh, it's quite hard to, um, um, avoid anthropomorphize, isn't that the right word? It's quite hard to avoid viewing these creatures through human terms. And I've just done it there, right? I've used the word view, which is a visual term. You know, we are a species whose cited members rely on vision very heavily. And our terminology for perceiving the world is heavily influenced by vision.

just that word there, using view to mean perceive is symptomatic of that. So in writing the book, I tried really hard to not use visual language when I'm talking about non-visual senses, to not like foist human terms on these creatures. And it's difficult because sometimes there just isn't an obvious alternative, especially when you think about sensors like, say, electroreceptions. sensing electric fields. Like there, the lingo is all stuff like potential and voltage and current, you know, stuff that feels, I think, abstract to most people.

It doesn't come, you know, electroreception doesn't come with like the rich lexicon that sight or sound might have. We have to take a short break. When we come back more from science writer Ed Yong, author of the new book, an immense world. how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us, all about the smell, vision, touch, and unique senses animals use to perceive the world. I'm Maddie Safaya, this is Science Friday. We've been talking with science writer Ed Yong this hour about how animals,

and I mean non-human animals, sense the world around them. From seeing colors we can't even imagine to the faint electrical fields generated by all living things. He's written all about it in his new. book, An Immense World, How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. There's an excerpt on our website, if you want to take a look, sciencefriday.com slash senses. That's sciencefriiday.com slash senses. So let's stick into some of these sensory systems.

And I want to start with, I think, my favorite that was in the book, you write that Animals have been sensing seismic vibrations since they crawled out of the ocean. How is this different than sound, which is like vibrations of the air? Right. So what we usually think of as sound are waves of pressure moving through the air. But, you know, similar vibrations can also course through the ground. You know, most obvious examples of when an earthquake happens, you feel that. that rippling of the ground.

But that also happens to a much, much smaller extent through more regular activities. Whenever we walk, we send seismic vibrations along the ground beneath us. And if you have the right sense organs, you can detect those vibrations. And many animals absolutely do that. This world of seismic sensing is often neglected.

You know, we tend to focus on the airborne stuff and we neglect all the stuff that goes on beneath our feet. The leaf hoppers I talked about at the start of this interview are a prime example of that seismic sense. But it's, you know, there are lots of other creatures from earthworms to elephants that also detect these surface-borne vibrations. In spiders, our absolute masters of this, the spiders. that build their own webs are effectively extending their sensory systems into the world around them, you know, through the architecture that they make with their own bodies. Yeah, absolutely. In one example of seismic sensing that completely blew me away, I was like, I had to put the book down for a second.

Baby tree frogs can sense the vibrations of predators while they are inside the egg. Can we talk about it? Yes, we can. So this is a, this all comes from a long body of work by Karen Walkington, who's an amazing biologist. So they worked out that at a time when everyone thought that embryos were just passive, entities. Walkington showed that, in fact, they are still actually actively sensing the world around them and can sometimes react to that world. So these baby tree frogs inside their eggs can detect the vibrations of a snake that's trying to chew on this cluster of eggs and they'll react

by releasing an enzyme from their face that dissolves the eggs and allows them to break free and plop into water. That's right. That is in Evolution. You know what I mean? I know, absolutely. Good job, evolution. It's solid. Solid work here. Right, so these are creatures that are maybe four days old.

Technically, they're sort of zero days old, right? They haven't even hatched it. They're still inside the egg, but they still have an unveld. They still have an awareness of their surroundings. And they can differentiate between the kinds of vibrations created by a chewing snake and those created by, say, you know, the patter of rainfall or the shaking of the ground. You know, it's not just that like any kind of vibration sends them busting out of the egg. It's very specifically the vibrations created by predators.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. And then this chapter also, you can tell how jazz day. I'm about this chapter. And then, in that, this chapter also had a really good example of how predators have evolved to exploit the senses of their prey, kind of the reverse, including their seismic senses. And you have kind of a funny story about some Florida residents who have been unknowingly mimicking the way moles hunt earthworms. Right. Yes, that's right. So there is this practice called worm grunting where, you know, you create seismic vibrations in the ground by rubbing, like, iron against a steak. This happens in Florida. People go out into the woods and they create like strong vibrations in the ground and earthworms start rising up from the ground and then

can be collected and used as bait. And this, it turns out that these vibrations mimic the stimuli created by burrowing moles. And so the earthworms essentially, are trying to flee from what they think is a mole quake. Right. But that is, in fact, the work of Floridians inadvertently mimicking a mole. I love it. Oh, my gosh. Okay.

Okay. So let's move on to a different chapter, which is a chapter that you wrote about pain, which I thought was really unique and I hadn't thought that much about. You call it the unwanted sense. Give us some pain 101. It turns out there's a difference between the sensory perception of hurt and the emotional thing we call pain. Everybody who's ever broken a bone or had a chronic illness kind of knows what I mean.

We all know the sensation is telling us information, but it's also different from the great deal of suffering around that information. Right, totally. So if I touched a hot pan, for example, My arm is going to start recoiling before I realize that I have touched something hot. And that reflex is fueled by what's called no seception. There are receptors in my hand that detect that something harmful, that I've touched something harmful and that forces me to recoil. Then afterwards, shortly afterwards, I feel the pain.

of the injury. It sucks. I am suffering. That negative emotion is pain. And there is a distinction between those two, like the actual detection of the harm and then the emotional response to it. Now, there has been a lot of debate about whether animals have the latter. Like, all animals seem to have the former, right? They all do no seception. They can all recoil from something that's going to hurt them. But whether they have that emotional suffering or not is something that is very hotly debated. But I think in the middle is where a lot of the reality lies.

I think a lot of animals do have an experience of pain. Yeah. You know, from fish to crustaceans. But I don't think that it's going to be exactly the same as what we experience. Right. I think there's going to be a lot of variety there. And that's a little weird, right?

I think we think of pain as, universal, but it isn't. You know, there are a lot, so if I, like, get, like, chili oil all over my hand, that's really going to sting. Right. The same chemical that causes that sting doesn't cause pain at all. In birds, for example, like naked mole rats. And even, like, closely related animals can experience pain in very different ways.

If an octopus, you know, injures the tip of its arm, it'll know, oh, like, arm number six is injured. I'm going to look after that. If a squid has an injury on part of its body, it doesn't seem to understand, like, which part of its body has been injured. It just seems to have this, like, whole body hypersensitivity. Right. So even there, like, what we, you know, this idea of pain is going to manifest in very different ways. Yeah. Animals that we think of as being closely related.

Okay. this is good because I want to ask you about something you wrote in your chapter about pain and as this unwanted sense. You write that this quest to understand animal pain is another conversation driven by our own biases. We're often asking questions like, can I eat this animal? Morally, what can I do to this animal? What should we be asking instead? The more interesting questions rather than just do,

animals feel pain or not? Like, what kinds of pain do they feel? Like, how does that manifest to them? You know, under what conditions have different types of pain evolved? You're right that this is such a charged topic. And it, I think, makes us forget the nuances that we understand in some different senses. So some people have argued that, you know, this distinction between no seception and pain is actually quite artificial. And it's not that we make that distinction for things like vision, for example. People aren't talking about the distinction between photo reception, the detection of light and vision. There's the subjective experience of the visual world, except that that distinction absolutely exists. We can very much talk about it, and people do.

It just doesn't have that same like moral charge that talk of pain does. And I think that that moral charge is absolutely vital. Like it shapes the ways we think about caring for animals, like our responsibility. to them. But it shouldn't stop us from asking these more interesting nuanced questions about exactly what their experience really is like. All right. Okay. So we don't have time to talk about all the chapters and animals in your book, unfortunately. But we have to talk about the Beatles. You know, we have to. Yeah. Okay. More specifically, the Beatles that chase forest fires. Right. So there are a few species of beetles.

that fly towards forest fires, which seems to be like the wrong direction, right? Like you fly away. But they fly towards the fires because a charred forest actually is a pretty sweet place to lay your eggs if you're a beetle. Your grubs will hatch in an environment where there are no predators,

where the trees have been weakened and make for easier meals. And so these beetles fly towards fires and have probably the most dramatic sex in the animal kingdom amid the flames in this amazingly metal way. But this ability is contingent on their ability to detect forest fires. And they do that by sensing the heat from those fires, the infrared radiation that those fires give off

over truly incredible distances. People have documented these beetles like arriving at like barbecues or like sports stadia at the time. when people were like smoking cigarettes a lot and you had like these you know, like thousands of points of heat for these Beatles to be distracted by. And yeah, it's

an absolutely incredible ability. Just a quick reminder that I'm Maddie Safaya and this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking to science writer Ed Young who has a new book about, who has a new book, book about the things animals feel that we can't. Okay, so your book starts with the senses of other

animals, but ultimately ends with humans with us. And what you say is that we, unlike the octopus or the owl, can glory in worlds we cannot perceive with our own senses. That ability is actually our greatest sensory skill. Tell me more about that. Yeah. If, you know, If I was in a room with a rattlesnake, a dog, an elephant, an owl, firstly, you might question my life choices. But also, you know, you might realize that all of us are going to be experiencing that room in a very, very different way, even though we share the same physical space. But the one thing that I, the human, that I think is unique,

is the ability to ponder about what those other creatures are experiencing. The knowledge that their sensory worlds are different, hours. Now, you know, it's, it's, there's a long history of people claiming wrongly that humans have some skill that no other animals have. But I think this is a reasonable claim to make in this instance, because like, thinking about other sensory worlds doesn't come naturally even to humans. You know, it took, it took a lot of like philosophy and research to actually get to the point where I can write a book like this. So, you know, we have now this ability to ask, like, what does an electric fish sense? What does a bat sense? What does a rattlesnake sense? And that ability to go on these sensory voyages to try and like jump into the umwelt of another creature is a profoundly human gift. And I think that one that we really ought to cherish and not throw away.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, just as a final note, I mean, how do we use that gift responsibly? How do we use that gift, you know, that power for good? Yeah, at the end of the book, I write about the problem of sensory pollution, the fact that we have flooded the world with light and sound in a way that distracts and waylays and harms the other creatures around us. And paradoxically, we, despite the fact that this kind of pollution is very obvious to us, we neglect it because we don't think of light and sound as possible pollutants. We think of them as good things, part of our lives. But by forcing other creatures to exist in our own belts, we neglect the ways in which they live their lives. And sometimes we end those lives as a result. I think that thinking about other own belts allows us to be better custodians of the world, you know, better carers for the other creatures around us.

I think it also makes us more profoundly connected to that world. You know, we understand the creatures in it better. If we remove unwanted sources of light and sound, we can see those creatures better. You know, it's not for nothing that early on in the pandemic, people realize that they could, we hear lots of birds around them that they couldn't hear before because the world was a quieter place. You know, I think by respecting other Umbuddin, we become better connected to nature. We recognize that nature is something that exists in our backyards rather than something

distant. And I would hope then that we feel a more profound call to care for it and to appreciate it. All right. That's all the time we have. Ed Young, thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. Ed Young is a science writer and author of an immense world, how animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us. There's an excerpt on our website if you want to take a look, sciencefriday.com slash senses. That's science friday.com slash senses. And one more thing before we go. Next Monday at 10 a.m. Eastern Time, we're giving listeners a behind-the-scenes look at what goes into making a segment for the radio show. Did you know, know that female athletes are up to six times more likely to get an ACL injury compared to their

male counterparts? Join us as we record a segment with researchers parsing out why this is. We're taking your questions. Find out how to join at ScienceFriiday.com slash live stream. And here's Valissa Mayers with some of the folks who helped make this show happen. John Donkoski is our director of news and audio. Diana Montano is our experience as manager. Beth Rami is our controller, and I'm office manager, Valissa Mears. Thanks for listening. Thanks, Felissa. BJ Leederman composed our theme music. If you missed any part of this program or would like to hear it again, subscribe to our podcasts or just ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Iris back next week. I'm Maddie Safaya.