The ocean of life
A reflection on coexisiting
Focus is spending time on what is important and ignoring what isn’t. This is generally good!
But focus isn’t free. A prioritisation of our inner world means that our outer world comes second. Events in faraway places and lives beyond our vicinity are only important to you and me if we can comprehend it — if we make it a priority for ourselves.
I live in one of the densest metropolises on Earth, New York City. More humans live here than anywhere else in the Americas, nearly 30,000 souls in a square mile. This is an epicentre of what our species prioritises: finance, trade, culture, healthcare, education, and so on. We consider this city to be one of the finest achievements of our civilisation.
Yet wild animals are seen here, at their best, as a nuisance, getting in the way of our busy lives and causing havoc. At their worst, they are an active hazard: we call in the pest control and exterminate them.
This viewpoint pits us against animals. It turns our experience of our shared world into an us vs them problem. We humans don’t habitually seek to learn from or understand other species. No, we aim to dominate. And given our resources, we usually win.
And whilst I’ve always loved animals, even when they’re getting in the way (ask my girlfriend if I was on her side or her resident house mouse’s side), I’ve never been able to understand what it’s really like to be another animal. I’ve never understood what it’s like to scurry along the baseboards as a mouse, to soar over the forest as an eagle, or to navigate the depths as an octopus.
Then, this past month, two books shattered my perspective. They unlocked a door I hadn't known existed — a portal into the hidden, inner worlds of other creatures.
The first book is An Immense World by Ed Yong. This ‘World’ in the title isn’t the familiar Earth that we know. It’s a foreign and strange land — the sensory landscape that makes up the inner experience, or umwelt, of animals around us. Ed takes us on a journey through these senses, explaining how they work and making them digestible. There’s senses that you use daily: touch, sound, sight and so on, but also others that may surprise you: magnetoreception, electroreception, echolocation and more.
I’d love to share an anecdote about each and every sense. The book is packed with real stories of how animals use them to understand and interact with their world: to hunt, navigate, communicate, and mate. Each is a fascinating tale describing the dance of evolution: animals make sense of their natural environment, adapt to it, in turn the environment adapts to them, and the cycle continues.
Here are my three favourite stories from the book.
Firstly, Elephants are able to communicate in infrasonic, a low frequency of sound that is completely invisible to you and I. Where we might use a phone call, an elephant uses infrasonic to communicate over huge distances — up to 15 km in the dry season, far beyond the abilities of our sight! These are calls of greetings, distress, and more: the full spectrum of emotions that we know elephants exhibit, and much else that we do not yet understand:
The sensory landscape of a rainforest — elephants, birds, insects. Listen, and you immediately feel the immense power of an elephant, surrounded by a cacophony of noise from other flora. Rainforests truly are animal cities.
Amazingly, blue whales also use infrasonic, but have taken the use of the sense to a whole other level: they communicate across whole oceans! An album made of these whale dronings even went multi-platinum in the 70s. And if we only recently learnt that whales can sing, what more can we learn about their behaviour and lives?1
Secondly, migrating songbirds can seemingly perform magic. They use the extraordinarily weak magnetic field of the Earth to help them navigate during migration. This is amazing for two reasons. Firstly, we don’t know how birds perform magnetoreception, though there is much speculation on the exact mechanism. It’s a great mystery in biology — the last unknown sense. And secondly, the Earth’s magnetic field is nearly imperceptible — it’s 10 to 100 times weaker than a fridge magnet. How could a tiny songbird notice that, using an organ and mechanism that we are unable to identify, let alone use it as a global satnav?
Finally, humans are also more capable than we give ourselves credit for. Did you know that humans can use sound to see the world? That’s right — we can echolocate, just like a bat! Amazingly, blind practitioners of echolocation have even trained themselves to cycle on busy city streets:
The most touching aspects of An Immense World, however, are about how we relate to animals who depend on us. Dogs have a famously keen sense of smell. They use their nose to how we might use our eyes or touch, repeatedly scanning and sniffing around them to understand who went where and when. The behaviour makes sense to a dog — it’s how they understand and enjoy the world. But to a human taking Rufus on a walk it’s misbehaviour. Rufus is distracted, impatient, an annoyance.
So we tug on them and hurry them on our way. We limit our pets to only a portion of lived experience, and think they are bad when they don’t behave the way we want.
Rufus deserves better, and so do we. Loving our pets means striving to understand and honour them as unique individuals, with their own needs and desires.
The second book I read is Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It’s a thrilling sci-fi story told through the many-eyed perspective of a species that you and I are (likely!) fearful of — jumping spiders.
I can barely comprehend the inner world of a spider. Navigating a world in ultraviolet light and using vibration to communicate instead of sound is simply impossible for me to understand.
But Children of Time goes beyond explaining differences in senses. It helped me understand what it’s like to be a spider by telling us the story through the viewpoint of a spider. Their societies are female-dominated, made up of hatchling peer-groups instead of families, and are incredibly violent. The male spiders are something of an underclass in society. Smaller, weaker, and fearful, they typically end up devoured as part of overenthusiastic mating rituals. And our spider protagonists face a great enemy that is powerful on our own planet too: ants.
Despite these challenges, the spiders build a thriving culture. They develop agriculture, writing, art, religion, science, and powerful technology, initially mirroring and later even surpassing human achievements. It’s a civilisation built by and for spiders — foreign and strange, just like their sensory landscape is to us, but grand and wondrous in its own special way.
The humans in Children of Time don’t quite see it like that. They too hate spiders, just as you and I (likely) do today. And so they’re unable to understand the differing needs of spiders and the unique way they experience the world. It ends up being us vs them: a fight for survival. The humans ultimately pit themselves against the spiders, blood flows, and disaster ensues.
I was fortunate enough to pick these two fantastic books up at the same time. My luck revealed their common, important truth: animals are integral to the story of our world, just as we are to theirs. Humans are not fundamentally special or unique; we are simply another part of the intricate tapestry of life, just as every wave is part of the same vast ocean.
My girlfriend’s resident mouse, the spider in my window, and the rat on the street were never my enemy, but fellow artists painting on the canvas of existence.
It’s an immense world, and it’s worth sharing2.
Thank you to Marquita, Jess Sun, MacEagon Voyce, Rebecca Dai, and Vivek Singh for their feedback on earlier drafts.
Shipping sadly causes an immense amount of noise pollution for whales, disrupting senses they’ve relied on for millennia and resulting in many avoidable deaths.
Sharing our world with animals does not mean you must now live as an ascetic in the high mountains. Indeed, I believe you can respect the divinity in all beings whilst also eating meat.
I strongly recommend watching this video of a tribesman hunting a kudu on the savannah. The tribesman is acutely aware of the life he pursues and is grateful for its sacrifice, as we ought to be today to the animals who support us.
While it [the kudu] was alive, he lived and breathed with it, and felt every movement with his own body. And at the moment of death, he shared it’s pain… and he gives thanks for the life that he has taken so that he may sustain the lives of his family.