Weirdest Senses Animals Have That You Don't

Animals have senses that give them an entirely different experience of this world. Some of them are basically superpowers. Here's some of the weirdest ones that are almost impossible to imagine.

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TIMESTAMPS -
0:00 - Daredevil
2:27 - Echolocation
4:35 - Tremor Sense
6:14 - Heat Sense
8:14 - Electrosensing
9:37 - Natural Compasses
11:25 - Smelling Disease
13:23 - Super Taste
14:51 - Biomimicry Benefits
16:20 - Sponsor - NordVPN

[ktevans]

I really appreciated the your mom joke in there, thank you sir.

[aretoo-]

In the summer of 1992, my wife and I took a trip to the Florida keys. One of the events was a day at the Dolphin Research Center in Marathon Key. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my entire life (for many reasons that I won't go into here). But the most incredible thing happened when we were finally allowed to get in the water with the dolphins. They were not captive; but instead free-swim mammals that could leave out to open ocean anytime they wanted - they just liked to hang around and work with the Marine Biologists (and the visitors!). I climbed down into the lagoon first. and the dolphins came over & checked me out; splashing, "talking", etc. However, when my wife got in the water, something completely different happened...one-by-one, all the female dolphins started to gather around her in a circle; clicking incessantly. My wife started to get a little unnerved by this. The Bilologist was watching from the platform, and asked me "Is your wife pregnant?" I told her "Yes, about 5 months". She said "They know. They can see the baby. As long as she's in the water, they will not allow anything to come near her." How incredibly cool is that ?!?

[ShadyMonkOfficial]

Was slightly surprised to not see this mentioned.. I recently saw a video online of a spider caught in a cup, and a pair of girls were trying to take a video of it with their smartphone. When they would tap on the table the spider wouldn't flinch, but every time they tried to focus on the spider by tapping their phone screen where the spider was, the spider would flinch as if it was responding to the tap directly. It was discovered that the spider was responding to the lidar or infrared signal being emitted from the phone every time it sent out a beam to focus. Apparently spiders and some other animals like deer can see this spectrum, but humans can not.

[izzybitney]

My mom had a mark on her arm that was pretty normal, it really only looked like a mole. My dog would sniff at it for upwards of a minute every time she saw her so I told her to get the spot looked at. She just got it biopsied and the results came back yesterday. She has Melanoma and is going to a cancer specialist next week.

[arbitr_]

my childhood dog actually found skin cancer in my dads forearm when i was growing up. Its was a spot she was fixated on and anytime he was around she would keep going back to that spot. He got checked soon after and come to find out she detected very early melanoma and basically saved my dads life because it was found so early. More so than for hospitals, i think having a dog in the home that can smell cancer is extremely valuable, I'm not sure how we would go about that but if your dog every gets fixated on a spot on your body, best to get it checked.

[jumpander]

Echolocation Sense:
I learned the "Daniel Kish style" human passive and active echolocation (even though my vision is perfect). It is simultaneously suprisingly simple and difficult. The concept is simple: You just have to learn to interpret, single out, enhance, discard and/or focus on specific sounds. But the difficult thing is the "sound vocabulary" that you have to build up by making a tongue click at literally everything you "see". It's just like learning Chinese is theoretically simple to learn, yet you have to study and learn thousands of vocabulary words in order to understand it. I'm at an active echolocation level now where I can comfortably walk through my own rooms, dangle along a forest path without swaying to the sides too much, find my way around in rooms and buildings where I've never been before. Perfectly blindfolded, of course. I've even trained myself to interpret the sound as "images". This imaging technique can be a blessing *and* a curse because once aquired I even see sounds when I try to fall asleep.

Tremor Sense:
I'm experimenting making this sense available for humans, too. I achieve this by combining a relatively small compression spring that has a small rubber ball on the one side and a magnet on the other. Then, I attached an equally sized magnet to the base of my thumbnail. This construction allows me to put this sense on and off whenever I like. The magents are very thin and small so they usually don't bother me. Now, whenever I move my hand - and especially my thumb - the vibrations and kinetic energy gets amplified by this small self-built tremor sense as the ball oscillates on the small compression spring. It is a really weird feeling because my brain interprets the vibrations that I can newly sense now as sound. So if the self-built compression spring tremor sense swings back and forth at 5Hz I'll hear 5 Hz. The same goes for smaller and higher frequencies. The thumbnail is very sensitive and ideal for things to stick onto without irritating the skin. I'm working on a combination of differently sized compression springs on a single stick-on tremor sense construction so that I'll be able to "hear" more than just one frequency at a time.

Polarization sense:
Humans can see the polarization of light. It's called Haidinger's Brush and is located in the center of the visual field. But it is way too faint to have any practical use in day to day life. However, we can wear passive linearly polarized glasses where the left lens polarizer is rotated to 45 degrees and the right one to 135 degrees. Putting these glasses on you can see stress patterns as colored patterns in conditions where there is polarized light and/or polarized filters. And you can make out the general polarization of light in the form of (dependently monochromatic) light intensity differences. If you now wear appropriate glasses with two differently colored lenses (that don't possess a stress pattern or birefringence) you can even see this polarization in a dichromatic gradient instead of a situational monochromatic one. With the right interfernce glasses (like: Infitec's Triple Band Pass Interference Glasses) you can make the colorful stress patterns (birefringence) even way more visible, sharp and distinct AND give (monchromatic) polarized light a dichromatic gradient.

Tetrachromacy or more:
I'm working on making humans more than trichromats by bestowing a fourth cone or something similar onto them. Earlier, I mentioned Infitec's Triple Band Pass Interference Glasses (TBP glasses) that split the RGB cones in our eyes into R1G1B1 in the left and R2G2B2 in the right eye. This is achieved by the combination of multiple band pass filters in a single lens. If we take the green cone for example the TBP glasses split the cone sensitvity into two parts: The left eye now only receives a green where all the green cones that are more sensitive to red-ish light are cut off and the right eye now only receives a green where all the green cones that are sensitive to more blue-ish light are cut off. In effect, it makes 2 cones out of one. And because a lesser sensitivity of a cone type results not just in a perceived luminosity change but also in a perceived color change - because the surrounding colors shift closer in to the color space of the diminished color - you implement impossible color combinations into your vision. This happens to all three cone types and enables you to make out color differences you could have never imagined being able to differentiate before. Unfortunately, you won't see any new "primary" color. However, I feel like I can see new secondary and tertiary colors / color differences.

With only a single magenta lens over one of my eyes I calculated that I can even see at least 1.25 times the colors (especially in the yellow-green/lime and cyan-green/turquoise color space). Wearing this single magenta lens allows me to make out double the color differences in the lime and turquoise color space. So where the green to greenish-lime colors #00FF00 and #20FF00 look identical to me under normal conditions, with the single magenta lens on these two colors are as different to me as #00FF00 and #40FF00 (where I can normally see a slight difference). So this an increase in color discriminability from 40 down to 20, that is double the color discriminability. I can make out details in cyan to yellow things I could have never noticed before, even (and especially) on RGB screens. Yellow is as different from green to me now as red is from green. And red glows like a beacon. My subjective color contrasts are definitely a lot higher.

And this is only the beginning. I'm working an active XR glasses and software (the glasses I mentioned before are all passive) that implement impossible colors into the perceived color spectrum. So like a red-orange, a red-yellow, a red-lime, red-green, a magenta-green, a cyan-red, a green-purple, etc. With this technology you can implement at least 155 new distinct (impossible) color combinations into your color spectrum. And oh boy, I've already seen it. The camera and color pass through quality of the XR glasses I used were abysmally bad and yet it was so beautiful. You can imagine what I saw with it like Star Trek's Geordi La Forge's VISOR. (There are clips online that show what he'd see. It was in an offical episode.) There is color in color in color in color and it's not an exaggeration. If you can learn to make sense of this even tetrachromacy seems inferior.

As you might tell, I'm a sense researcher. I love senses because they are the only things that connect us to this world. If you can sense more of this world by acquiring more senses or enhance the already existing ones, this world will become even more beautiful and rich in detail.

[antonystringfellow]

Electric Eels - you missed those.
Electric Eels can move forwards and backwards, without contacting anything, even in sediment-filled opaque water. They create an electric field around their body that enables them to sense what's around them through their skin.
It's a bit like echo-location only using electricity rather than sound.

[BnORailFan]

I remember watching a news report years ago where a cat in a nursing home could sense the pending death of a patient. The cat was so accurate that the people working there notified the next of kin so they can make one last visit.

[WorldOfEnchantment]

Tortoises don’t have ears yet can hear your voice and come to you when you call them. We think they know your vibrations. I own an exotic animal sanctuary and we were a tortoise rescue for 15 years. It’s an incredible phenomenon

[michaelch]

How about the dogs who are able to smell high sugar levels in Type 1 Diabetics, or the cat in the rest home who was able to tell when one of the patients was about to die, this was documented in over 100 cases. Animals are amazing! Thanks for sharing

[zappababe]

Regarding echolocation by blind people, I remember seeing a programme where a young blind guy was using just that to get around and was refusing to use a cane. Another blind person showed him that echolocation wouldn't let him know if there was a hole in the road in front of him, whereas a cane would have warned him that the ground wasn't solid ahead of him.

[MrBendybruce]

As someone who has recently become visually impaired, I find it quite inspiring to learn about how are people have managed to sharpen their other senses in order to compensate. I have certainly noticed that I pay a lot greater attention to my sense of touch and for example use it to properly orientate my clothing when folding or getting dressed in a way that was very difficult when this first happened to me.

[officialerzascarlet]

in my opinion the mantis shrimp is one of the weirdest but coolest Animal to existed, because it has 12 color cones (16 in some reports), which means they can see both ultraviolet and infrared.
they also hit the hardest of any living creature because, their club like arm accelerates faster than a bullet out of a gun, which can break through shells.

[achristiananarchist]

I used to be a Sonar Tech in the Navy, and our man-made sonar works the same way as the bat's ears. The transducer switches between a "transmit" mode, where it can emit sound but can't hear, to a "receive" mode, where it can hear but not transmit so that it doesn't "blind" itself with every transmission. The stuff about "telepathy" in dolphins got me thinking about a couple of things though, as this same sort of "telepathy" is how I learned to "echolocate". By that I mean looked at an listened to subs recorded by people who had seen them before, figuring out what their diagnostic features were and learning to ID real ones in the wild. I imagine that dolphins would probably teach their children to hunt in a similar way. Of course, most of my own training didn't involve listening to recorded pings bouncing off of subs. Finding something you are screaming at is actually pretty easy so you don't have to spend much time on it. The vast majority of my own training revolved around detecting subs "passively", that is, just listening and and figuring out what it is you are looking at before you turn on that loud ass sonar that will give away your position. For every one hour I spent practicing at tagging and tracking active contacts, I probably spent 4 working through "grams", recordings of known subs that you have to ID based on the frequencies they emit. Bonus points if you can get range, bearing, course, and speed information from the gram. I imagine that there would be similar pressures on animals like dolphins, who would probably listen for the sounds of a school of fish before focusing their sonar on a known location, rather than clicking away using active search and scaring away all the fish. One good way to see if dolphins are teaching one another or transmitting information by mimicking the returned clicks from a given piece of stimuli may be to see if they are doing this for other, stranger sounds. Do dolphins ever mimic the tailbeats of a school of fish or the staticky clicking of a school of shrimp? I'd be interested to see if mother dolphins are mimicking very undolphinlike sounds to teach their children what prey sounds like.

[RonHarrisMe]

I was a Dog Trainer for the U.S. Navy. For the most part I trained bomb, drug and cadaver dogs. When it comes to how dog's smell, the amazing part is their ability to distinguish each of these scents. An easy way to explain it is, when you pull up to a McDonalds, you smell food. A dog smells, beef, bread, catsup, mustard, potatoes, oil etc.. they can distinguish each ingredient. This is of course is how they find your "drugs" when they are encased in things like coffee or whatever you "try" to hide your drugs in. It's the same with human remains, even with all the other scents in the air, they break them all down and ignore what they are not trained to look for. It is really amazing.

[peterjf]

Years ago I worked in a large photographic lab. Part of that was a blacked out corridor that went from six printing darkrooms to two paper processors. Two or three of us would be working in that area at the same time. We never collided with each other untill there was a cold going round that muffled our hearing, we had to start calling out to each other to avoid collisions.

[MrHhkjhkj]

In regards to using sound to determine structural integrity:

I used to work on tanker ships that transport fuel for the Navy. We would always clean the tanks before we entered a shipyard for repairs. One of the times I thought it was very cool that the company occasionally hires experienced climbers to climb around in the tanks "sounding" the different parts of the metal structures to make sure the metal hasn't thinned to the point of needing to be replaced.

Extra related info: A big part of my job was removing rust from the metal and painting over it. This is a big contributor to the thinning of the metal.

[randynovick]

All dogs have two incredible superpowers that you didn't mention. The first is the ability to spread out and occupy all the surface of any human's bed, and do it silently while you are asleep. The second is an exponential increase in the gravity affecting the hind end of the dog whenever the words "go to the vet" are spoken or spelled out. The butt of a thirty pound dog will weigh more than ninety pounds once the phrase is uttered.

[lyledal]

Getting to hang out with the doggos would be a lot more pleasant than getting put in a CT scanner. That's for sure!

[stevenspeaker]

How do you keep on finding so many interesting topics?! You never disappoint. Love the videos and I love how you made analogies to help us understand what it’s like for animals to sense. So cool.