(Furries) A good resource for comparing animal senses?

[tantric]

I'm having a hard time finding a simple resource that compares animal senses. What would be amazing would be a standard unit, like an AU, that compares animal senses to human. Say, wolves have 3x human olfactory, and .5 vision with poor color vision....

I'm pretty sure I could find a book on it if I still had access to a university science library.

[vicky_molokh]

Well, there's bels/decibels for sound (as in, minimum and maximum absolute thresholds, and discriminatory thresholds). You might have luck checking out medical units for ophthalmology etc.

[Bruno]

The problem is that IRL these things aren't measured on a one dimensional axis.

Define "better" hearing, for instance - width of frequency range? Sensitivity to quiet sounds? Tolerance of loud sounds without loosing sensitivity? Discrimination between two or more sounds happening at the same time? Recognition of sound origin ("that sounds like a mouse!" vs "That sounds like Bob the mouse, and he's nibbling on a piece of dried corn, not the pine box.")? Direction sensing of sound origin in two dimensions? What about three dimensions and the asymmetric ear-holes on owls?

None of the senses are simple :/
Hearing and vision are easiest to describe because humans are pretty good at them both and rely on them heavily, but they're all a complex combination of factors.

[Anthony]

Part of the problem is that it's actually very difficult to determine sensory acuity of animals, as they're poor at participating in tests and reporting results. Differences are often immense, though; as I recall, typical vision for a dog is somewhere around 20/100 with only two color receptors, but scent is orders of magnitude superior to human.

[dbm]

The BBC did a series called Super Sense which was all about how animal senses differ from human ones. If you can get access to this in your territory then it would be worth a look, for broad-brush information at least.

The 1999 version would seem to be the best option. I was sure it was more recent than that - I'm getting old! :-O

[whswhs]

Back in the day, I did huge amounts of searching for such material, without a lot of luck. Biophysicists think in terms of quantitative detail with MKSA units, but they only pick out illustrative example. Most other organismal biologists and experimental psychologists aren't so quantitatively oriented. And I don't think there's actually a lot of research demand for comparative performance stats for human and nonhuman senses; that sort of thing is more the material for coffee table books.

Bill Stoddard

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Bruno

The problem is that IRL these things aren't measured on a one dimensional axis.

QFT. Senses vary in a lot of ways.

My personal favorite introduction is David B. Dusenbery's _Sensory Ecology_ 0-7167-2333-6. It's pretty old, but has the virtue of being written pretty much from an engineering perspective.