Study
Sensory Ecology, Behaviour, and Evolution
Stevens, Martin
Oxford University Press, 2013
A textbook treatment of how animals acquire and use information, covering each modality in turn, the physical constraints on signal transmission in air and water, the trade-offs that shape sensory systems, and the methodological problem of inferring perception from behaviour.
- Studied in
- Animalia
- Sample size
- textbook synthesis of sensory ecology
Sensory systems are shaped by the physics of the environment and by the specific tasks an animal performs, and no sensory system is general-purpose: sensitivity in one dimension is routinely traded against resolution, speed or energy in another.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Sensory biology is best framed as an ecological and evolutionary question about the information an animal needs, rather than as a catalogue of capacities.
How NatureHQ reads it
The framing this whole family is built on, and it names the trap: sensory abilities invite ranking, and ranking is almost always meaningless. There is no scale on which a mantis shrimp’s vision and a hawk’s can be compared, because they are solving different problems at different speeds under different light. The useful question is never which animal senses best but what each one needs to know, and what its physics allows it to find out.
- A textbook: broad by design, and superseded in specifics by later primary work.
- Coverage is weighted towards vision, which is true of the field as a whole.
- The trade-off framing is a productive lens rather than a demonstrated law.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Animal senses
The five senses are a list from classical philosophy, not a finding. Electric fields, magnetic fields, water flow, polarised light and radiant heat all have receptors that fit none of them.
Animal senses
Pictures captioned "what a bee sees" are translations into human colour of something a human eye cannot receive. They can be accurate about the information and cannot be accurate about the experience.
Magnetoreception
A bird’s compass appears to run through its eyes and to need light. That is not the same as the bird seeing the magnetic field, and nothing has shown that it does.
Ultraviolet vision
A bee has three colour channels like us, and they sit in different places: ultraviolet, blue and green, with nothing sensitive to red. Its colour world is shifted, not expanded.
Animal senses
Mantis shrimp have twelve classes of colour receptor and can tell colours apart less finely than a human with three. Counting receptors does not measure colour vision.
Animal hearing
Low sounds carry much further than high ones through air, vegetation and water. That physical fact, more than anything about the animals, explains who communicates at long range and who does not.
Camouflage
Nothing is camouflaged in the abstract. An animal is harder for a particular viewer to find — and an animal that is invisible to one predator can be obvious to another with different eyes.
Published by: Academic book publishersPublished as an academic monograph.
doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199601776.001.0001
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-02.