The famous philosopher Aristotle was the first to assign humans with five traditional senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. However, if he categorized animal senses today, the list would have been longer. Several animals possess additional perceptive abilities that allow them to experience the world in ways we can barely imagine. Here's our list of 11 animals that have a sixth sense.

1 of 11 Spiders USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab / Flickr / Public Domain All spiders have unique organs called slit sensilla. These mechanoreceptors or sensory organs, allow them to sense minute mechanical strains on their exoskeleton. This sixth sense makes it easy for spiders to judge things like the size, weight, and possibly even the creature that gets caught in their webs. It may also help them tell the difference between the movement of an insect and the movement of the wind, or blade of grass.

2 of 11 Comb Jellies evantravels / Shutterstock Jellies have some sensory organs unfamiliar to those of us with human senses. These majestic gelatinous creatures have specialized balance receptors called statocysts that allow them to balance themselves. Ocelli allow the eyeless animals to sense light and dark. Both of these are part of the nerve net that enables the comb to jelly to detect food nearby through changes in the chemical structure of the water. Since they don't have a centralized nervous system, comb jellies also rely on this specialized sense to better coordinate the movements of their cilia to reel in food.

3 of 11 Pigeons bluelake / Shutterstock Pigeons have a sixth sense called magnetoreception. Many migratory birds have a unique ability to detect Earth's magnetic field that they utilize like a compass to navigate great distances. Few birds perform it better than pigeons, especially domestic homing pigeons. Scientists have learned that pigeons have magnetite-containing structures in their beaks. These structures give the birds an acute sense of spatial orientation, allowing them to identify their geographical position.

4 of 11 Dolphins Oli Anderson / Getty Images These charismatic sea mammals have the incredible sixth sense of echolocation. Because sound travels better in water than in air, dolphins create a three-dimensional visual representation of their surroundings based entirely on sound waves, much like a sonar device. Echolocation allows dolphins and other toothed cetaceans, whales, and porpoises, to hunt for prey where visibility is limited or non-existent, whether that is a murky river or the depths of the ocean where light doesn't reach.

5 of 11 Sharks nicolas.voisin44 / Shutterstock Electroreception is the remarkable ability of sharks and rays to detect electrical fields in their surroundings. Jelly-filled tubes called ampullary of Lorenzini house this sixth sense. The arrangement and numbers of the ampullary vary depending on whether the primary prey is active or more sedentary. The strange shape of a hammerhead shark's head allows for an enhanced electroreceptive sense because it enables them to sweep a greater area of the ocean floor. Because saltwater is such a good conductor of electricity, sharks with a refined sixth sense can detect their prey from the electrical charges emitted when a fish contracts its muscles.

6 of 11 Salmon Katrina Liebich / USFWS / Flickr / CC BY 2.0 Salmon, as do other fish, have magnetoreception, or sensing the Earth's magnetic field as their sixth sense. Salmon notably find their way back to spawn in the same rivers from which they were born, despite traveling great distances in the open ocean during their adult life. How do they do it? It is still mostly a mystery to science. Scientists believe salmon utilize magnetite deposits in their brains to pick up the Earth's magnetic field. Salmon additionally have a refined sense of smell and can discern the scent of their home stream in a single drop of water.

7 of 11 Bats Regis Martin / Lonely Planet Images / Getty Images Bats have a trifecta of sixth senses, or perhaps a sixth, seventh, and eighth sense: echolocation, geomagnetic, and polarization. Bats use echolocation to find and capture prey. They have a larynx capable of generating an ultrasonic buzz, which they emit through their mouths or nose. As the sound travels, sound waves bounce back and give the bats radar-like information about their surroundings. This only works to provide them with a short-range perception of their environment--distances of about 16 to 165 ft. Bats use their geomagnetic sense as a compass to navigate long-distances, such as for migration. Magnetite-based receptors in their brains, possibly in their hippocampal and thalamus neurons, give bats this ability. The most recently discovered "sixth sense" is polarization vision. Polarization vision, or sensing the sun's pattern in the sky, is something bats can do even on cloudy days or when the sun has set. It is unknown what physiological structure gives them this ability since bats do not have the visual forms found in other animals that use the position of the sun's rays. Therefore, this vision isn't seeing in the traditional sense when it comes to bats. Bats use this sense in conjunction with their geomagnetic sense for navigation.

8 of 11 Mantis Shrimp Lea Lee / Getty Images Mantis shrimp also have a sixth sense related to polarization. They detect and communicate with other mantis shrimp using linear polarized light, even in ultraviolet and green wavelengths. On top of that, they also can do this with circularly polarized light. Mantis shrimp are the only animal known to have the circularly polarized light capability. These abilities give them a vast repertoire of signals that only other mantis shrimp can see and understand.

9 of 11 Weather Loaches Geza Farkas / Shutterstock Weather loaches, also known as weatherfish, have an incredible ability to detect changes in pressure. They use this sense to monitor buoyancy underwater and to compensate for the lack of a swim bladder. This ability comes through something called the Weberian apparatus. The Weberian apparatus is present in many species of fish, and it improves hearing underwater. Remarkably, this sixth sense also allows these fish to "predict" the weather, and fishermen and aquarium owners have long recognized changes in their activity as large storms approach.

10 of 11 Platypus worldswildlifewonders / Shutterstock These bizarre, duck-billed, egg-laying mammals have an incredible sense of electroreception, similar to the sixth sense of sharks. They use this ability to find prey in the mud of rivers and streams. The platypus has about 40,000 electroreceptor cells in their bill, found in stripes in both halves of the bill. The bill also contains push-rod mechanoreceptors, which give the animal an acute sense of touch and make the platypus' bill its primary sense organ. A platypus swings its head from side to side while swimming as a way to enhance this sense.