Key Takeaways on Umwelt
- Umwelt is a concept that discusses how all organisms perceive their environment differently, and the word means "environment."
- Established by biologist Jakob Uexküll in the early 20th century, scientists can study it, but they cannot experience animals' umwelt.
- The concept of umwelt is reshaping how scientists study animal behavior.
There are as many worlds as there are living beings, at least according to Jakob Uexküll, a German-Estonian biologist who coined the term ‘umwelt’ in the early 20th century to describe an organism's perceived, or subjective, experience.
The German word ‘umwelt’ literally means “environment” but is often translated as “surrounding world.” Neither of those terms quite captures what Uexküll was getting at.
As the Dutch-American ethologist Frans de Waal explains in his book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, “Umwelt is quite different from the notion of ecological niche, which concerns the habitat that an organism needs for survival. Instead, umwelt stresses an organism’s self-centered, subjective world.”
And according to Uexküll, the way an animal experiences its environment is determined by the physiology of its senses.
How We Study Umwelt
In a 1934 booklet aimed at lay readers, Uexküll illustrates this with the example of a tick, according to a study from Springer Nature Link. A tick can neither see nor hear, but can easily detect butyric acid on the skin of a mammal. A quick sniff, and the tick drops from its resting place onto the mammal, feels the warmth of the animal’s skin, burrows in, and begins sucking blood. That’s the world of a tick: the scent of butyric acid, the warmth of a mammal’s skin, the flow of blood into its body.
Explore All OptionsOr think of a bat, navigating its world by sonar. Or a great white shark, cruising through the murky depths of the ocean, sensing the movements of its prey through its lateral line organ.
These are worlds we humans can never experience, nor can any animal experience another animal’s umwelt, according to Uexküll. An umwelt is necessarily unique and private. This would seem to put the biological sciences in a precarious position. How can we study the world? How can we even begin to understand the biological world if we have access to only one small sliver of it?
Read More: Do Animals Smile Because They're Happy? Why a Grin in Nature Doesn't Always Mean What You Think
Two Ways of Looking at Umwelt
Tim Elmo Feiten, a philosopher of science at Penn State University, has done extensive work on Uexküll and the concept of umwelt. Feiten told Discover that Uexküll actually uses the term ‘umwelt’ in two different ways. In one of his more well-known books on the subject, Uexküll provides rules for biologists, some of which stress the point that the scientist can never have access to the sensations of the animal, Feiten said.
However, Uexküll also uses the term in a more precise fashion, as something he calls functional cycles — like the cycle of the tick smelling, burrowing, and feeding, according to a Frontiers in Psychology paper.
“Uexküll thinks that once you've mapped out the functional cycles of an animal, you have mapped out its umwelt,” said Feiten. “There is a sense in which, when you are studying an animal, you are constructing something like a diagram or a conceptual account of its umwelt.”
So while scientists can never understand another animal’s umwelt as a first-person subjective experience, they can view it from a third-person perspective.
“Every animal lives in its own world, and even though we can never have direct access to the sensations of the animal,” Feiten said, “we can study it in its natural environment and then draw inferences about its umwelt.”
Old and New Ways of Studying Animals
The early 20th century saw the emergence of the field of ethology, a method of animal research that tried to understand animals as a part of their environments. Konrad Lorenz, known today as the father of ethology, was greatly influenced by Uexküll. Yet Feiten pointed out that in the second half of the 20th century, especially in the English-speaking world, animal research changed.
In an effort to make sure that study results were valid and could be replicated, many researchers began to bring animals into the laboratory and studied them under what were, for the animals, very artificial conditions. If the concept of umwelt suggests that we can never truly know animals because we can’t access their umwelt, this laboratory approach presents the opposite barrier: What can we learn of animals if we’re studying them under conditions that are so alien to their normal lives?
In a 2019 paper published in the journal Neuron, Alex Gomez-Marin and Asif Ghazanfar wrote that such “automatized” and “sterilized” approaches to studying animal behavior remove the animal from its natural context.
They call for a more “integrative biology of behavior,” one that encompasses the concept of umwelt. Understood this way, the concept of umwelt is not the end of science, but perhaps a more enlightened way of practicing it.
Read More: Wildlife With Weaker Social Connections May Face Greater Extinction Risk
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from German History Interactions: Jakob von Uexküll, Rambles through the Environments of Animals and Humans: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds (1934)
- This article references information from a study in Springer Nature Link: Uexküll’s Theory of Umwelt: The Worlds as Seen by Living Beings
- This article references information from a study in Frontiers in Psychology: Mind After Uexküll: A Foray Into the Worlds of Ecological Psychologists and Enactivists
- This article references information from a study in Neuron: The Life of Behavior
