SUPERSENSES – INVISIBLE WORLD

Sight and sound are two of humans’ most important senses, and to us the world seems full of dazzling colours and bustling noises. But compared to some animals, our senses are sorely limited. Beyond our scope of perception, there is an invisible world that humans know little about, but that some animals rely on in order to survive. We delve into a kaleidoscopic world of colour, discovering the ways in which insects use ultraviolet light to guide them to their food like a landing strip, and blue tits use the sheen of their dazzling crown to choose a healthy mate. We may think that the world around us is full of noise, but there are many sounds that our ears simply cannot detect. In this episode, we explore the way in which elephants use infrasonic sounds - too low pitched for human hearing - to keep in touch with family members over a hundred miles away, and to find a mate in the vast African savanna. Bats, on the other hand, use incredibly high-pitched sounds, far above the range of human hearing. Through echolocation, they use ultrasonic sound waves to locate their prey on the wing, and capture them with deadly accuracy. Other creatures have even more unimaginable senses, experiencing an invisible world completely outside the realm of human detection. Stingrays utilise electric fields to seek out prey hidden on the seafloor, while the ball python uses heat detection to create a visual image of its target, and the industrious dung beetle uses polarized light to find the quickest route away from the competitive dung heap. We learn that, in fact, the way in which we perceive the environment around us is just the tip of the iceberg - there is a whole invisible world out there, if you just know where to look.

Episodes Supersenses
Super Sight
Super Powers
Invisible World