Edward Forbes Quotes

Zero of Animal Life probably about 300 fathoms.

The one thing I've learned exploring the deep is that you just can't even begin to imagine some of the bizarre creatures that are down there.

Even in our deep ocean, there are ecosystems at work with no light whatsoever down in the deepest portions of the oceanic abyss.

The deep sea is a scary world.

There's a lot of animals in the open ocean - most of them that make light. And we have a pretty good idea, for most of them, why. They use it for finding food, for attracting mates, for defending against predators. But when you get down to the bottom of the ocean, that's where things get really strange.

To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts.

In the deepest places, where physical norms collapse under the crushing water, bodies still fall softly through the dark, days after their vessels have capsized. They decay on their long journey down. Nothing will hit the black sand at the bottom of the world but algae-covered bones.

Light doesn't penetrate beneath the surface of the water, so ocean creatures like whales and dolphins and even 800 species of fish communicate by sound. And a North Atlantic right whale can transmit across hundreds of miles.

I was brought up to understand Darwin's theory of evolution. I spent hours and hours in the Natural History Museum in London looking at the descriptions of how different kinds of animals had evolved, looking at the sequence of fossil bones looking gradually more and more and more and more like the modern fossil.

The biggest bursts of speciation that we know about in the history of the earth are soon after great cataclysms, like the extinction of the dinosaurs, which create new opportunities, and all sorts of new forms spring up... So, quite often, the reasons for creativity depend on accidents or disasters that prevent the normal habits being carried out.

Two-thirds of earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface.

The fish that first ventured ashore had considerable practical problems.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

If you do not change, you can become extinct !

We can be the new brand of self-extincting dinosaurs or we can evolve.

An now the silences come in a single lifetime, in a single year... when species die, leaving a silent space in the world song that can never be filled.

In New Zealand we had this colossal squid, which was discovered just off the shores of New Zealand, between New Zealand and Antarctica back in 2003. It's the biggest squid ever found, and I know that there's things living down in the depths of the ocean that do explain the Kraken - you know, these giant things that people saw back in the day, that could take ships down - and so I know that there's stuff out there, and I like the idea that we haven't solved everything yet.

Where do we record the passing of wildlife? Who mourns the silent deaths of the small?

Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.

More birds have adapted to a changing world than have failed. Very few have the narrow tolerance of the ivory-billed woodpecker or the Bachman's warbler.

If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life.

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.

I would love to see a giant squid. Very few people have seen them. And only about half a dozen people have seen one alive.