Quotes About Species

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.

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species. It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people

What made it particularly interesting was that it multiplied easily in various species, in monkeys, humans, guinea pigs. It was extremely lethal in these species, which meant that its original host was probably not monkeys, humans, or guinea pigs but some other animal or insect that it did not kill. A virus does not generally kill its natural host.

Are you worried about a species-threatening event?" He stared at me. "What the hell do you mean by that?" "I mean a virus that wipes us out." "Well, I think it could happen. Certainly it hasn't happened yet. I'm not worried. More likely it would be a virus that reduces us by some percentage. By thirty percent. By ninety percent.

A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out

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.

El hombre era el único animal que acababa con la vida de los de su propia especie por millones

Birds are beautiful. After a lifetime of study I still love to look at them and listen to them, even the common species.

The American Ornithologists' Union, in a decision published earlier that year, had decreed that the White-winged was just a local variety, not a full specieis. So much for the Black Hills' only claim to birding fame. The juncos themselves, of course, did not seem to care; watching them, neither did I.

Natural selection is almost always handled in general temps . . This means that it has no explanatory power when specific problems arise.

Young man, nature is not frightening, it's people who are frightening! You just need to get to know nature and it will become friendly. This creature known as man is of course highly intelligent, he's capable of manufacturing almost anything from rumors to test-tube babies and yet he destroys two to three species every day. This is the absurdity of man.

All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.

A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.

The Towner paper contained a very interesting statement, as an aside, concerning the five ebolaviruses: "Viruses of each species have genomes that are at least 30–40% divergent from one another, a level of diversity that presumably reflects differences in the ecologic niche they occupy and in their evolutionary history.

The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast—above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill—has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.

Spillover" is the term used by disease ecologists (it has a different use for economists) to denote the moment when a pathogen passes from members of one species, as host, into members of another. It's a focused event.

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.

Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species. Description or law, it challenged the theory of special creation and bruited the idea of evolution in a tone of thunderous innuendo.

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.

From the ecological point of view an outbreak can be defined as an explosive increase in the abundance of a particular species that occurs over a relatively short period of time." Then, in the same bland tone, he noted: "From this perspective, the most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

The order Chiroptera (the "hand-wing" creatures) encompasses 1,116 species, which amounts to 25 percent of all the recognized species of mammals. To say again: One in every four species of mammal is a bat.

The stability of species represented the bedrock of natural history.

A reservoir host is a species that carries the pathogen, harbors it chronically, while suffering little or no illness.

Wilson came up with this: "When Homo sapiens passed the six-billion mark we had already exceeded by perhaps as much as 100 times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on the land.