Predator-Prey Relationships Quotes

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

Say, will the falcon, stooping from above, Smit with her varying plumage, spare the dove? Admires the jay the insect's gilded wings? Or hears the hawk when Philomela sings?

Nature is a series of murders.

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.

The one sure way to conciliate a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.

The lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.

An army of lions commanded by a deer will never be an army of lions.

Every lion has a time in their life when a thorn has got to them at one point.

Frogs eat Butterflies, Snakes eat Frogs, Hogs eat Snakes, Men eat Hogs.

An infallible method of conciliating a tiger is to allow oneself to be devoured.

Without sharks, you take away the apex predator of the ocean, and you destroy the entire food chain.

Why are we designed to see the world as supremely beautiful just as we're about to be snuffed? Do rabbits feel the same as the fox teeth bite down on their necks? Is it mercy?

Mama used to tell us a story about a cicada sitting high in a tree. It chirps and drinks in dew, oblivious to the praying mantis behind it. The mantis arches up its front leg to stab the cicada, but it doesn't know an oriole perches behind it. The bird stretches out its neck to snap up the mantis for a midday meal, but its unaware of the boy who's come into the garden with a net. Three creatures—the cicada, the mantis and the oriole—all coveted gains without being aware of the greater and inescapable danger that was coming.

The frog does not drink in the pond in which he lives.

Nature herself is a mass murderer, making casual, cruel experiments and condemning 10,000 to die so that one more fit will live and thrive.

Nature appears to have been the cruel stepmother rather than the mother of many animals.

The fox remains always a fox, the goose remains a goose, and the tiger will retain the character of a tiger.

You cannot friend a hawk, they said, unless you are a hawk yourself, alone and only a sojourner in the land, without friends or the need of them.

Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow speared by the shrike, And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.

The duck swallows the worm, the fox kills the duck, the men shoot the fox, and the devil hunts the men.

When we became sedentary, lived indoors, and started to raise livestock, we began to see wolves not as occasional fur-bearers or fellow hunters but as robbers.

Whether the bear beats the wolf or the wolf beats the bear, the rabbit always loses.

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts.

Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life.