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Book Cover for: Fish Sense (Picador Shorts), Jonathan Balcombe

Fish Sense (Picador Shorts)

Jonathan Balcombe

A quirky, intimate, and eye-opening look into the ways of thinking like a fish.

An extract from the much-loved modern classic on the subject of fish consciousness,
What a Fish Knows.

Do fishes think? Do they really have three-second memories? And can they recognize the humans who peer back at them from above the surface of the water? Jonathan Balcombe dives in among our marine cousins to explore the essential questions of how fish perceive and process the world.

With his ethologist's gift for showing us the hidden depths of questions we've routinely preferred to think of as simple, and his raconteur's flair for the surprising and the curious, Balcombe takes us under the sea, through streams and estuaries, and to the other side of the aquarium glass to reveal the surprising capabilities of fishes. Balcombe upends our assumptions about fishes, portraying them not as unfeeling, dead-eyed feeding machines but as sentient, aware, social, and even Machiavellian―in other words, much like us.

Using humor and a repertoire of some of the most surprising fish facts you've ever heard, Balcombe shakes up what you think you know about what's going on inside the mind of these denizens of the deep.

Fish Sense is part of the Picador Shorts series "Oceans, Rivers, and Streams" in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Picador USA
  • Publish Date: Jun 10th, 2025
  • Pages: 112
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.50in - 5.00in - 1.00in - 1.00lb
  • EAN: 9781250391216
  • Categories: Agriculture & Food (see also Political Science - Public PoliAnimals - FishEcosystems & Habitats - Oceans & Seas

About the Author

Balcombe, Jonathan: - Jonathan Balcombe is the director of animal sentience at the Humane Society Institute for Science and Policy and the author of Second Nature and Pleasurable Kingdom. A popular commentator, he has appeared on The Diane Rehm Show, the BBC, and the National Geographic Channel, and in several documentaries, and is a contributor of features and opinions to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Nature, and other publications. He lives in Maryland.