Super Senses: Wild Feats of Evolution

On this episode we travel from the desert to the forest, Australia to Borneo and back, to learn how species as diverse as bat-eared foxes, the bilby, deer, kangaroo rats, cicadas, proboscis monkeys, and other creatures never miss an auditory trick. This one is all about hearing!

In this episode we'll explore the animal sense of sight, and you'll see there's a lot more to this than meets the naked eye. The human imagination is limited when it comes to animal senses. People with good vision are sometimes called "eagle eyed", but eagles can see a fish from many dozen meters away. You won't believe how some other animals see the world!

On this episode of Super Senses, we get in touch with the feelings of wild animals. Really in touch, because animals, just like humans, rely heavily on their sense of touch every day in every way. There may be a fine line between pleasure and pain, but not knowing the difference between the two can be absolutely fatal.

On this episode of Super Senses, we examine how things taste, and how vital scent is from the animal perspective. Some animals' sense of smell can detect odors from miles away, and can be as powerful a tool as sight is in humans. In mammals, taste receptor cells are scattered over the tongue, but in other creatures, they can be located in some fairly odd places.

There are senses we share with most animals, but what about those senses that humans aren't equipped with? Infrared light, electromagnetic waves, and ultrasound are all found within a spectrum of sensory information that just passes by ordinary humans. This episode is all about those 'super human' senses.

There's a whole world of sensations that animals are aware of but humans are completely unable to detect. While it's widely known that, for example, a dog's sense of smell is dozens of times more acute than humans', or that goats have close to a 360 degree field of vision, there's a kind of "sixth sense" that some animals have which still defies explanation.