Food Web Quotes

We are what we eat, it is often said, but of course that's only part of the story. We are what what we eat eats too.

North American cats eat more fish than all the world's seals put together, yet we lay the blame on the seals for the declining fish stocks.

There is part of a structure in which every species is related to every other species. And they're built up on species, like a pyramid. The simpler cell organisms, and then the more complicated ones, all the way up to the mammals and birds and so forth. We call it 'developing upward'... The whole thing depends on every part of it. And we're taking out the stones from the pyramid.

I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world.

Always acknowledge your position in the food chain... They eat because you grow the food.

The food you eat today is walking and talking tomorrow.

Healthy populations of predatory crabs and fish protect the carbon in salt marshes, as they prevent herbivorous crabs and snails wiping out the plants that hold the marshes together.

That's the food chain that cricket is sometimes. You have to be at the top of it otherwise you get swept away and eaten up.

So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known whenever we are shown a link of it.

If we recognise that every ecosystem can also be viewed as a food web, we can think of it as a circular, interlacing nexus of plant animal relationships (rather than a stratified pyramid with man at the apex)… Each species, be it a form of bacteria or deer, is knitted together in a network of interdependence, however indirect the links may be.

When you're cooking with food as alive as this -- these gorgeous and semigorgeous fruits and leaves and flesh -- you're in no danger of mistaking it for a commodity, or a fuel, or a collection of chemical nutrients. No, in the eye of the cook or the gardener ... this food reveals itself for what it is: no mere thing but a web of relationships among a great many living beings, some of them human, some not, but each of them dependent on each other, and all of them ultimately rooted in soil and nourished by sunlight.

If you're overfishing at the top of the food chain, and acidifying the ocean at the bottom, you're creating a squeeze that could conceivably collapse the whole system.

The message is not so much that the worms will inherit the Earth, but that all things play a role in nature, even the lowly worm.

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm

To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.

Land is not merely soil, it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.