I’ve been slowly working through Ed Yong’s An Immense World—a magnificent overview of the world of animal senses (and how mightily they differ from ours), and was bowled over by a technique he deploys in a section about how the amazing touch sensitivity of sea otters helps them locate food on the sea floor:
Imagine that, right now, a sea otter is about to search for food. Floating on its back on the surface of the sea, it rolls and dives. It will only stay submerged for a minute—roughly the time it will take you to read this paragraph. The descent eats up many of the precious seconds, so once the otter reaches the right depth, it has no time for indecisiveness. In a few frantic moments, it presses its knobby mittens over the seafloor, inspecting whatever it can find. The water is dark, but darkness doesn’t matter. To some of the most sensitive paws in the world, the ocean is bright with shapes and textures to be felt, grasped, pressed, prodded, squeezed, stroked, and manhandled—or perhaps otterhandled. Hard-shelled prey nestle among the similar hard rocks, but in a split second, the otter feels the difference between the two, and pulls the former from the latter. With its sense of touch, its dexterous paws, and it’s overabundant mustelid confidence, it snatches that clam, yanks that abalone, grabs that sea urchin, and finally ascends to eat its catches, breaking the water at the end of this sentence.
The concurrence of the two acts—the otter’s dive and the reader’s reading—is showy writing, of course. But it’s showy writing that makes a strong point. It’s difficult, at the remove of reading a book about animals, to appreciate the unfolding of animal sense. But Yong takes advantage of duration—a commonality between otter fishing and reading—to show just how efficient and sensing otters are in their hunt.
Taylor Coe 