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There is a moment, somewhere around the third or fourth chapter of An Immense World, when the floor of your assumptions quietly gives way. You realise you have been walking around inside a tiny lit room, mistaking its four walls for the whole of reality, while just outside the window a crocodile is reading the pressure of water with a face as sensitive as a lover's fingertips, a songbird is hearing intervals within notes you will never parse, and a tick is patiently waiting for the butyric acid of your skin with no concept that anything else in the world exists.

Yong organises his tour around the concept of umwelt, the German term for the perceptual bubble each creature inhabits, and proceeds chapter by chapter through smell, taste, light, colour, pain, heat, contact, surface vibrations, sound, echoes, and finally the genuinely alien senses of electroreception and magnetoreception. The structure is traditional popular-science scaffolding - travel the globe, interview the specialists, report from the lab bench - but the animating idea elevates it. Rather than ranking animal senses against our own or treating them as superpowers to envy, Yong insists on meeting each creature in its own house, with its own windows, looking out at its own garden.

The result is page after page of the kind of fact that makes you interrupt whoever happens to be in the room. Starfish see through the tips of their arms. Sea urchins see with their entire bodies. The star-nosed mole feels the world through its nose and the manatee through its lips. Scallops, those simple bivalves, turn out to have surprisingly sophisticated vision. Embryonic tadpoles can sense the vibrations of an approaching snake and hatch themselves early to escape. Dolphins can use echolocation to detect a fish hook lodged inside a tuna three-quarters of a mile away.

Yong's prose carries all of this with what feels like an almost effortless grace, though the reporting behind it is anything but. The bibliography runs to nearly fifty pages of small print, and every anecdote seems to arrive from a specific scientist in a specific lab or muddy field site. He is also genuinely funny, which helps, because some of the material is conceptually slippery. Describing a form of perception that humans simply do not have - the quivering electrical field sense of the platypus, say, or the magnetic compass threaded through a sea turtle's skull - means continually running up against the limits of language and metaphor, and the book occasionally does feel overstuffed, as if a reader might need to put it down and come up for air.

The final chapters, on pain and on the sensory pollution we have poured into the world through light, noise and chemistry, turn the wonder into something heavier and more necessary. Yong makes the quiet, serious argument that we cannot protect what we have never bothered to perceive. An Immense World is a genuine act of imaginative generosity, one of those rare popular-science books that alters the texture of ordinary walks and ordinary rooms long after you close it.