You don't have to be an animal lover to know that animals can do some pretty amazing things. There are some that can fly long distances, others that can hold their breath underwater for unbelievable amounts of time, and still others that can run at speeds that would make Usain Bolt jealous. There are some animals, though, who have senses of smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing so strong that they seem like superpowers. Here are the five animals with the strongest senses to make you jealous too.
Strongest eyesight: eagle
Birds of prey—eagles in particular—have a truly incredible range of vision. Eagles (and some species of hawks) look at the world with vision that is eight times sharper than a human's. There are around 1 million sensory cells per square millimeter in an eagle's retina, which enables them to pinpoint their prey from almost a mile away and keep track of it even as they fly overhead, making them an extremely formidable predator.
Strongest hearing: greater wax moth
The Galleria mellonella, better known as the greater wax moth, has the best hearing in the entire animal kingdom. It can pick up the greatest range of sonic frequencies—up to 300 kHz, to be precise. This is around 15 times higher than the frequencies that the average human can pick up, and they use this skill for a very clever and important purpose: avoiding the bats that would normally prey on them. Bats can find their prey's location using echolocation, a series of ultrasonic sounds that most people think are only audible to bats. The greater wax moth, though, can hear these sounds too and can use it as a warning bell to get the heck out of Dodge.
Strongest sense of smell: bear
If you have ever wondered how bears are so easily able to sniff out the food bag in your tent when you're camping, this is why. Bears might have a brain that is only one-third as large as ours, but the part of their brain responsible for their sense of smell is five times larger. A bear's sense of smell is more than 2,000 times better than a human, enabling them to avoid potential danger, hunt for food, find mates, and know where their children are at all times. The average bear can smell a dead animal carcass from 20 miles away, and polar bears can even follow the scent of a prospective mate for more than 100 miles.
Strongest sense of taste: catfish
The catfish might sound like a surprising candidate for the animal with the best sense of taste (the fishermen among us are probably more likely to think about tasting them). However, the average catfish has around 100,000 to 175,000 taste buds, well over 10 times the amount that we humans have. To make things even more interesting, these taste buds are not just inside the fish's mouth, but all over its body, with most of them being located on the whiskers on its face. It uses these taste buds to taste whether there is food nearby, but also to figure out its location based on the taste of the water, due to the fact that it lives in dark, muddy places and doesn't have very good eyesight.
Strongest sense of touch: manatee
The sense of touch may be the hardest to describe, as there are many different aspects that make up what it means to feel something. Manatees, though, have what is referred to as the ability to "touch at a distance," meaning that they can feel things without even touching them, even if those things are really far away. The body of a manatee is covered in thousands of whisker-like hairs that allow them to feel things and help them to notice changes in their surroundings such as temperature, currents, tidal forces, and of course objects, which gives them a leg up (or tail up) on the rest of the animal kingdom.
