There are five senses — smell, sight, touch, taste and hearing. Wrong! Sentient, a lively study of the natural world, will make you rethink the senses. For instance, the star-nosed mole — its nose is a slightly offputting mass of feelers — is the fastest hunter we know of, identifying and capturing worms in less than an eye blink. Its nose captures the same amount of information about what it touches as a regular rodent’s eye gathers about what it sees. A catfish is so overloaded with chemoreceptors that it can “taste” through skin; it has been dubbed a “swimming tongue”.
“For all that it’s stuffed with entertaining oddities,” Simon Ings wrote, “Sentient is not a book about oddities, and Jackie Higgins’s
