Quotes About Biodiversity

Nature is an incredible cooperative. When things operate outside of that cooperative, they die off. It's a very simple rule that nature operates under.

On Cape Cod, great white shark stocks have been growing, or at least becoming more concentrated, because of the multiplying numbers of seals around Monomoy Island. We are fortunate to have such abundance of these sharks in our own waters. Around the globe, we are killing in excess of 100 million sharks each year.

The one process now going on that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.

We'll lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than we've lost in the last 65 million years. If we don't find answers to these problems, we're gonna be victims of this extinction event that we're at fault for.

If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.

Botanists have a tradition of never revealing the exact location of a rare plant. Contact between humans and rare plants is generally risky for the plants.

I don't think we're going to save anything if we go around talking about saving plants and animals only; we've got to translate that into what's in it for us.

Globally, 12 percent of bird species, 23 percent of mammals, and 32 percent of amphibians are at risk of extinction. Since 1970, global populations of these creatures have declined by nearly 30 percent. Just how these losses will shift the distribution of microbes between and across species, pushing some over the threshold, remains to be seen.53

a single opossum, through grooming, destroyed nearly six thousand ticks a week.

The truth is that we will never save wildlife by killing it.

People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity-our most necessary resourse?

People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity—our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But

You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct. Don't you have that feeling now?

Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth

Natural selection has designed flowers to communicate with other species, deploying an astonishing array of devices—visual, olfactory, and tactile—to get the attention of specific insects and birds and even certain mammals.

In wildness is the preservation of the world," Thoreau once wrote; a century later

either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands. So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as, indeed, with all the species sharing this most complicated farm. Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild.

The greatest biodiversity of an species is typically found in the place where it first evolved -- where nature first experimented white all the possibilities what an apple, or a potato or peach, could be.

Organisms in the ocean provide over 40 percent of the oxygen we breathe, and they're the major sink for capturing all the carbon dioxide we constantly release into the atmosphere.

It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.

Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven—corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats—account for 93 percent of all that humans eat

Whatever the actual total, 99.99 per cent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.

Eighty percent of all that lives in Australia, plant and animal, exists nowhere else.