Quotes About Ecosystem

There may be ten million different species on the earth, or a hundred million species. The forest canopy is the earth's secret ocean, and it is inhabited by many living things that don't have names, and are vanishing before they have even been seen by human eyes.

If most of the area of habitat is destroyed, and a fraction of the area is saved as a reserve, the reserve will initially contain more species than it can hold at equilibrium. The excess will gradually go extinct. The smaller the reserve, the higher will be the extinction rates…. Different species require different minimum areas to have a reasonable chance of survival.

Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.

The duck swallows the worm

There's nothing worse for a forest than to have all the trees be the same

I had figured out something that seemed important: every bird had its place. None was "free as a bird." A few kinds were found all over the continent, but they were the exceptions.

Nature's creative power is far beyond man's instinct of destruction.

All life is part of a complex relationship in which each is dependent upon the others, taking from, giving to and living with all the rest.

Conservation viewed in its entirety, is the slow and laborious unfolding of a new relationship between people and land.

Ultimately, the wolves themselves made the reintroduction work.

The European rabbit flea is so synchronized with its host that a female flea only gestates when living on a pregnant doe; when the doe gives birth, so does the flea, and the new fleas find a happy home on the baby rabbit.

Third Fisherman:… Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.First Fisherman: Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land the great ones eat up the little ones.

If you drop one of us naked and alone into the wilderness, you've just fed the creatures of the local forest. But if you drop one hundred of us naked into the wilderness, you've introduced a new top predator to this unfortunate stretch of woods.

Life starts in nature and returns to nature.

Some bacteria are more or less permanent residents; they form long-lasting colonies.

Vast areas of old forest have been cut, or chained down with bulldozers, to make way for cattle ranching and urban sprawl. People have planted orchards, established urban parks, landscaped their yards with blossoming trees, and created other unintended enticements amid the cities and suburbs. 'So bats have decided that, as their native habitat is disappearing, as climate is becoming more variable, and their food source is becoming less diverse, it's easier to live in an urban area.

As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we're getting their diseases.

At the Chatou market in Guangzhou, for instance, he had seen storks, seagulls, herons, cranes, deer, alligators, crocodiles, wild pigs, raccoon dogs, flying squirrels, many snakes and turtles, many frogs, as well as domestic dogs and cats, all on sale as food.

You could also buy leopard cat, Chinese muntjac, Siberian weasel, Eurasian badger, Chinese bamboo rat, butterfly lizard, and Chinese toad, plus a long list of other reptiles, amphibians, and mammals, including two kinds of fruit bat. Quite an epicure's menu. And of course birds: cattle egrets, spoonbills, cormorants, magpies, a vast selection of ducks and geese and pheasants and doves, plovers, crakes, rails, moorhens, coots, sandpipers, jays, several flavors of crow.

I think the virus is present all the time, within reservoir species," he told me. "And sometimes there is transmission from reservoir species to other species.

The term refers to cascading disruptions that can pass between trophic levels—that is, between different categories of interrelated organisms in the hierarchy of energy transfer within an ecosystem.

The ecosystem itself is not just a landscape full of plant and animal species; it's an intricate network of relationships, including those between predators and their prey, between flowering plants and their pollinators, between fruiting plants and the animals that disperse their seeds. Each such relationship constitutes a link between trophic levels.

know that walking into a small woodlot," he wrote, "is riskier than walking into a nearby large, extensive forest.