More related trivia:
All the migratory animals, from insects to whales, have something akin to spatial perception, sometimes traveling thousands of miles.
Some ants are known to count their steps from food to the nest. Bees do a dance to point to the angle of the pollen source from the hive, and their community can read the information and fly to the food.
Stationary cows tend to face either north or south.
Some animals behave unusually just before an earthquake.
Birds will fall silent during a partial solar eclipse, yet they will sing on a cloudy day.
Animals that travel in groups have a means of finding direction as a community decision that involves not only spatial perception of a compass heading, but also the ability to sense and respond to movements of the group itself.
Plants turn their flowers to follow the sun in order to maintain high visibility that attracts pollinators.
A certain moth protects itself from bats by sympathetic emission of a chirp that appears to the bat as a return signal, effectively jamming the bat's perception.
Even some primitive cells can swim through water trying to catch food while maintaining a reference to the sun, to which they return in a loop, in order to keep their photosynthesis apparatus working.
Every color, texture and pattern that evolved due to visual capabilities of predators, mates, pollinators, or rivals, seems to have evolved jointly, so that the one making display (or camouflage) and the one developing the visual acuity (or weakness) is exploited to make the creature most or least visible as needed for survival.
Bird song has specialized within the audio band into discrete pitches and durations that differentiate one species (or sub species) from another. And the melodies are so memorable to us that we can detect the creatures merely by melodic contours.
Female mosquitoes appear to select their mates by the spectral content of their buzzing.
Other insects that we hear using the audio band include crickets and cicadas. Compare these with whale song, and a common element is frequency modulation, which mitigates the natural damping of a particular environment (generally at a particular frequency), to increase the odds of transmission.
Snakes do well with olfactory and infrared perception. Other reptiles are very quick in optical band perception, fast enough to catch flies.
Many animals leave scent trails to navigate, such as mice, and others do so to mark territory.
Animals perceive threats, running from sounds or smells, striking at movement, or raising audible alarms to the community.
Taste and smell appear to have evolved from fish who have a similar capability.
Hounds can take a scent and track a moving target hours after it passed though the vicinity.
A hawk can dive and catch a rabbit seen from its perch 10 to 20 stories high.
A sparrow can catch a bread crumb before it hits the ground but will not even attempt to intercept a decoy such as plastic.
Some aspects of perception tend to be logarithmic. Humans experience logarithmic compression of amplitude and frequency. Thus we maintain a degree of sensitivity to subtle changes of muted sounds, responding similarly to large changes at high amplitude; and we preserve the sensitivity to subtle changes at low frequency, while responding similarly to large shifts at high frequency. These features enable us with a relatively wide the dynamic range and frequency response.
Voice spectrograms show that we perceive and differentiate between phonemes according to whether they are periodic (voiced) or not (unvoiced). Within both groups, features can be seen in the spectrograms that our aural perception is capable of recognizing in real time. Many voiced phonemes contain sets of tones, resonated in the vocal tract during speech, to produce usually two or three tones in a group, with characteristic contours visible in the spectrogram, that upon hearing we are able to recognize and distinguish in real time.
It has been said that aural perception is to visual perception as differentiation is to integration.
The thresholds at which we perceive changes in sensory stimulus are sometimes called differential limens of perception.
Some people, including many classical composers, associate color with sound, and some report a vivid color perception that is analogous to shimmering colored lights, one of various forms of coupling between perception and sense known as synesthesia.