Quotes from David Quammen

Southern Chinese have always noshed more widely through the animal kingdom than virtually any other peoples on earth. During the Era of Wild Flavor, the range, scope, and amount of wild animal cuisine consumed would increase to include virtually every species on land, sea, or air. Wild Flavor (yewei in Mandarin) was considered a way of gaining "face," prosperity, and good luck. Eating wild, Greenfeld explained, was only one aspect of these new ostentations in upscale consumption

Onward we climb. The upper slope is a crust of friable lava. It crunches like peanut brittle beneath our steps.

One of the signal lessons of Lyme disease, as Rick Ostfeld and his colleagues have shown, is that a zoonosis may spill over more readily within a disrupted, fragmented ecosystem than within an intact, diverse ecosystem.

Among the people visiting those temples, feeding handouts to those macaques, exposing themselves to SFV, are international tourists. Some carry away more than photos and memories. "Viruses have no locomotion," according to the eminent virologist Stephen S. Morse, "yet many of them have traveled around the world." They can't run, they can't walk, they can't swim, they can't crawl. They ride.

Then a very large komodo breaks into view, spooked by our trespass, and scrambles up the vertical face of the bluff, like an alligator scaling a four-story building.

He succeeded in staying out of exactly and only those forms of postadolescent trouble that were not winked at, sating himself with those that were.

Habitat doesn't replicate itself. Places get crowded. Creatures go hungry. They struggle. The result is competition and deprivation and misery, winners and losers, unsuccessful efforts to breed and, for the less fortunate individuals, early death. Many are called, but few are chosen. The book that awakened Darwin to this reality was An Essay on the Principle of Population, by a severely logical clergyman and scholar named Thomas Malthus.

People in south China will eat everything that flies in the sky, except an airplane.

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in it's slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

you're a carnivore, you're a carnivore, so what's the merit of fine distinctions?

One animal died and, after it tested positive for Reston virus, forty-nine others housed in the same room were euthanized as a precaution. (Most of those, tested posthumously, were negative.) Ten employees who had helped unload and handle the monkeys were also screened for infection, and they also tested negative, but none of them were euthanized.

A parasitic microbe, thus jostled, evicted, deprived of its habitual host, has two options—to find a new host, a new kind of host . . . or to go extinct. I

the epistatic fucking cirque du soleil of this virus is discombobulating.

It is a conflict between man and his parasites27 which, in a constant environment, would tend to result in a virtual equilibrium, a climax state, in which both species would survive indefinitely. Man, however, lives in an environment constantly being changed by his own activities, and few of his diseases have attained such an equilibrium.

scrum of paramyxovirus, containing long filaments with a sort

about 60 percent of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us.

Dovremmo sapere che le recenti epidemie di nuove zoonosi, oltre alla riproposizione e alla diffusione di altre già viste, fanno parte di un quadro generale più vasto, creato dal genere umano. Dovremmo renderci conto che sono conseguenze di nostre azioni, non accidenti che ci capitano tra capo e collo. Dovremmo capire che alcune situazioni da noi generate sembrano praticamente inevitabili, ma altre sono ancora controllabili.

Vivimos en un planeta complicado, rico en organismos de una vasta variedad, incluyendo los virus, todos interactuando de forma oportunista, y aunque existen 7.000 millones de personas, el lugar no se ha hecho a nuestra conveniencia y para nuestro placer.

What are they called? Sprackles, shakums, edible sequins, glossy sugar deedeebobs, I don't know. Instead of sprinkling them on a cookie, I sprinkle them on Angel de la Guarda.

Cualquiera que defienda el diseño inteligente en lugar de la evolución debería pararse a pensar en por qué Dios habría dedicado tal parte de Su inteligencia a diseñar los parásitos de la malaria.

For a dozen years it traveled quietly from person to person. Symptoms were slow to arise. Death lagged some distance behind. No one knew. This virus was patient, unlike Ebola, unlike Marburg. More patient even than rabies, but equally lethal.

What it means is that individual effort, individual discernment, individual choice can have huge effects in averting the catastrophes that might otherwise sweep through a herd.

But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds.

Desde luego, todo tiene un origen; y, dado que los seres humanos somos un primate relativamente nuevo, ha resultado lógico suponer que nuestras enfermedades infecciosas más antiguas han llegado a nosotros - transformadas, al menor ligeramente, por la evolución- procedentes de otros huéspedes animales.