Quotes About Species

If we assume, very conservatively, that there are two million species in the tropical rainforests, this means that something like five thousand species are being lost each year. This comes to roughly fourteen species a day, or one every hundred minutes.

a single-continent world would be expected to contain only about a third as many mammalian species as currently exist.

Of the world's eight species of bears, six are categorized either as "vulnerable" to extinction or "endangered.

Until recently, when both of them went extinct, there were two species of frogs, known as gastric-brooding frogs, that carried their eggs in their stomachs and gave birth to little froglets through their mouths.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species". (...) We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

every year more non-indigenous species of mammals, birds, amphibians, turtles, lizards, and snakes are brought into the U.S. than the country has native species of these groups.

If you count people as an invasive species—the science writer Alan Burdick has called Homo sapiens "arguably the most successful invader in biological history"—the process goes back a hundred and twenty thousand years or so, to the period when modern humans first migrated out of Africa.

When the world changes faster than species can adapt, many fall out. This is the case whether the agent drops from the sky in a fiery streak or drives to work in a Honda.

it has since been reduced to around five thousand animals.

At the heart of Darwin's theory

For the same reasons that local diversity has, as a general rule, been increasing, global diversity—the total number of different species that can be found worldwide—has dropped.

Such is the pain the loss of a single species causes

Erwin estimated that the tropics were home to as many as thirty million species of arthropods.

recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million.

The current extinction has its own novel cause: not an asteroid or a massive volcanic eruption but "one weedy species." As Walter Alvarez put it to me, "We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

THE SIXTH EXTINCTION

This particular species, though, had never been seen before; indeed, it was so unusual that an entire genus had to be created to accommodate it. It was named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis—batrachos is Greek for "frog"—or Bd for short.

a third of them to be in danger of extinction, largely as a result of rising ocean temperatures.

If Dicerorhinus sumatrensis has a future

vaccinated every single condor—today there about four hundred

Beginnings, it's said, are apt to be shadowy. So it is with this story, which starts with the emergence of a new species maybe two hundred thousand years ago.

Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

If there is danger in the human trajectory, it is not so much in the survival of our own species as in the fulfillment of the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations. —E. O. WILSON

As with any young species, this one's position is precarious.