Quotes About Predator-prey

The big beasts of Africa and Asia learned to avoid humans, so when the new mega-predator – Homo sapiens – appeared on the Afro-Asian scene, the large animals already knew to keep their distance from creatures that looked like it. In contrast, the Australian giants had no time to learn to run away. Humans don't come across as particularly dangerous.

Deer get to live in the wild, and then they die fairly quickly from a well-placed shot to the vitals. For a deer, the most likely alternatives are a slower and more painful death by a nonhuman predator (i.e., getting torn apart by a coyote), starvation, or disease. Being killed by a skilled human hunter may well be the least painful way for a deer to die.

While now and then you hear somebody talking about how ". . . beautiful and elegant the predator-prey relationship is, how natural and proper the death of the prey is," it is usually so much misunderstood balderdash by people who have not witnessed it very many times, or worse, by people who have witnessed only highly edited versions on film.

If the shrike did not eat the grasshoppers, then the grasshoppers would eat all the grass, and there would be none left for the deer...and the deer are food for the tiger. Life in the jungle is a giant spiderweb; if you touch one strand, it will vibrate at the other end. We cannot separate nature into good and bad, Rita. The gods do not will it so.

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

An Allosaurus backbone had a hole in which a Stegosaurus thagomizer fitted perfectly. Over the years, many of the fossil thagomizers that have been dug up have had broken tips.

the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness.

If you keep just close enough for it to see you, it will keep sprinting away. After about ten or fifteen kilometers' worth of running, it will go into hyperthermia and collapse." Translation: if you can run six miles on a summer day then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom.

Confident sheep overcome insecure wolves.