Superb, and missing my entire kingdom

This is about as good as science writing gets at the moment, and I still spent the entire book waiting for a chapter that never arrived.

The umwelt framing is the right frame and it is handled beautifully. The chapters on echolocation and on electric fields are the two I have already made other people read, and the treatment of magnetoreception is the first time I have properly understood what the honest state of that field is, as opposed to what the press releases say. He is scrupulous about uncertainty, which in this genre is rarer than it ought to be.

The scallop has up to two hundred eyes, each with a mirror behind it instead of a lens. I have told four separate people that fact this month and one has since bought the book, so the pipeline works.

But. Plants sense light quality and direction, they measure day length to a precision that would embarrass most of us, they detect touch and gravity and the volatiles coming off a neighbour under attack, and in Mimosa there is decent work on something that behaves uncomfortably like habituation. None of that requires a nervous system, and all of it fits the umwelt argument perfectly. Fungi likewise. There is a version of this book that is a third longer and includes them and it would be a better book, and I understand exactly why the publisher wanted the animals, and I am allowed to be a bit sad about it.

A fieldwork note, since I can't help myself. I once spent a season doing pollinator transects across a set of Cumbrian hay meadows, counting visits, writing down which insect went to which flower. I thought I was recording behaviour. What I was actually recording was two incompatible accounts of the same meadow: the one I could see, and the one being flown through in ultraviolet, with nectar guides lit up like runway markings I have not once perceived and never will. This book gave me a way of saying that out loud without sounding as though I had been in the sun too long.

The other thing I want to praise, and it is the thing I will keep, is how good he is on the limits of imagination. There is a passage about how a dog's world of smell is not our world with smell added, it is a different world altogether, and I have used that twice in lectures since, credited, to explain why we keep getting plant behaviour wrong. We imagine a slow animal. It is not a slow animal.

I listened to the first half and read the second. It is a well made audiobook, but this is a book stuffed with specific names and numbers and I kept wanting to go back, so paper won in the end.

Nine. The deduction is entirely professional self-interest, which I hope is transparent enough to be forgiven. My copy lives in the glasshouse with a coffee ring on the cover and I will not be replacing it.