Ecological Niche Quotes

A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?

Crocs are apex predators, and as with all apex predators, they are critical to the environment: if you lose the crocs, you'll lose the barramundi, you'll lose the crabs - a catfish can eat 30,000 barramundi fingerlings, and who do you think eats the catfish? Crocs.

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

The fast fish, not the big fish, eats the small fish.

In the course of evolution, it constantly happens that, independently of each other, two different forms of life take similar, parallel paths in adapting themselves to the same external circumstances.

I'm necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. But I'm still a parasite.

Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.

Specialization is for insects.

The way to understand how different species evolved is to think about the niches that they fill in an ecosystem - basically, how they make a living.

Living in an entirely different physical as well as biotic environment, such a population would have unique opportunities to enter new niches and to select novel adaptive pathways.

The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.

Nature's patterns sometimes reflect two intertwined features: fundamental physical laws and environmental influences. It's nature's version of nature versus nurture.

Wherever there is a design that is highly successful in a broad range of similar environments, it is apt to emerge again and again, independently - the phenomenon known in biology as convergent evolution. I call these designs 'good tricks.'

Everything in nature has found a niche, a perfect harmony of balance. Man need to find his niche, his perfect balance, where he fits in the natural cycle

The biological world always seems poised to innovate.

It has become evident that the primary lesson of the study of evolution is that all evolution is coevolution: every organism is evolving in tandem with the organisms around it.

I had found again and again that the most aberrant population of a species - often having reached species rank, and occasionally classified even as a separate genus - occurred at a peripheral location, indeed usually at the most isolated peripheral location.

Evolutionary science kind of bears that out: When species are rivals and competing for space and resources, the superior one wins. Nature has no compunction about that; it just is.

A whale is as unique as a cactus. But don't ask a whale to survive Death Valley. We all have special gifts. Where we use them and how determines whether we actually complete something.

One of the basic steps in saving a threatened species is to learn more about it: its diet, its mating and reproductive processes, its range patterns, its social behavior.

Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don't use it, and we don't adapt fast enough, we won't survive.

It gives evolutionary biologists great status if they champion competition and the economists have to consult them. The economists have to consult the evolutionary biologists, because they are the ones who invented the idea of competition. It comes from the field of evolution.

We observe closely related species in sympatry and infer how they evolved from a common ancestor.

Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass?